“If ever I would leave you,
How could it be in spring-time?
Knowing how in spring I'm bewitched by you so?”--"If Ever I Would Leave You,” from Camelot, lyrics and libretto by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1960)
Fifty years ago on this date, the musical Camelot, heavily freighted with all kinds of backstage trouble, premiered on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre. Despite general critical disappointment about this follow-up to My Fair Lady by lyricist-librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, the show, starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, went on for another 873 performances.
As soon as the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy told journalist Theodore H. White about how her murdered husband used to listen to the original-cast recording, the musical became indelibly associated with the thousand-days administration of John F. Kennedy.
I could write an entire book, let alone a single blog post, how that one single word “Camelot” summons up so many contrasting associations for admirers and critics of the President.
As for the backstage sturm und drang to which I just alluded, I don’t think I could possibly do a better job than Steven Bach did in his masterful biography of the show’s director, Moss Hart: Dazzler. (Suffice it to say that this adaptation of the T.H. White novel The Once and Future King taxed Hart’s waning physical resources so much that this great man of the theater died a year after he had successfully guided the show to its premiere.)
Instead, I thought I would try something different with this post and look at a pivotal moment from the show: the love song “If Ever I Would Leave You.”
In his memoir The Street Where I Live, Lerner related how he found the spine of this difficult project in the last scene, when the appearance of a small boy managed to keep alive the dream of this shattered medieval utopia.
Maybe. But I would identify the crux far earlier in the action--specifically, in this love scene between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.
I had never seen Camelot--not the movie version with Richard Harris, not the 1980 revival with Burton as Arthur, not even a high-school or community-theater version--until I watched a marvelous performance at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., in the summer of 2000. As I watched this small-scale, almost chamber version, the beauty of this majestic melody hit me full force--as well as a greater appreciation of the all-too-brief, disrupted intimacy between Arthur, his queen, and his good and trusted friend.
The song caps a period in which Lancelot is transformed from a popinjay into a knight of unsurpassed valor and purity. When he was first inspired to come to the court of the king, it was easy for everyone to dismiss this tall, handsome narcissist. (Think Alex Rodriguez joining the New York Yankees.)
But an incident of derring-do leads Arthur, then Guinevere, to accept him, and the egotistical knight now discovers values and people larger and worthier than himself. By the conclusion of this soaring pledge of love and loyalty to the end to Guinevere, he has decisively won audience sympathy, too. Lancelot’s discovery of the best in Arthur and Guinevere, then, renders all the more tragic the affair that ruptures the friendship and marriage and destroys the kingdom.
Whether knowingly or not, Lerner hints at the destruction to come with one word in the song: “bewitched.” Maybe he added it to indicate how enthralled Lancelot was by Guinevere, or maybe he subconsciously recalled one of the great moments in American musical theater, Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
But the word also harks back to the fate of Merlin. After instructing the youthful Arthur in the importance of peace and brotherhood, the monarch’s magician--one of his “wise men”--fell under the spell of the nymph Nimue into eternal sleep.
Far better than they could ever have realized, the creators of Camelot were foretelling that even the most rational of men--the “best and the brightest”--could run afoul of instincts they were powerless to resist. That, in turn, led to a kind of secret, underground history that resulted in disorder, disillusionment and tragedy--both in Arthurian England and 1960s America.
How could it be in spring-time?
Knowing how in spring I'm bewitched by you so?”--"If Ever I Would Leave You,” from Camelot, lyrics and libretto by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1960)
Fifty years ago on this date, the musical Camelot, heavily freighted with all kinds of backstage trouble, premiered on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre. Despite general critical disappointment about this follow-up to My Fair Lady by lyricist-librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, the show, starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, went on for another 873 performances.
As soon as the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy told journalist Theodore H. White about how her murdered husband used to listen to the original-cast recording, the musical became indelibly associated with the thousand-days administration of John F. Kennedy.
I could write an entire book, let alone a single blog post, how that one single word “Camelot” summons up so many contrasting associations for admirers and critics of the President.
As for the backstage sturm und drang to which I just alluded, I don’t think I could possibly do a better job than Steven Bach did in his masterful biography of the show’s director, Moss Hart: Dazzler. (Suffice it to say that this adaptation of the T.H. White novel The Once and Future King taxed Hart’s waning physical resources so much that this great man of the theater died a year after he had successfully guided the show to its premiere.)
Instead, I thought I would try something different with this post and look at a pivotal moment from the show: the love song “If Ever I Would Leave You.”
In his memoir The Street Where I Live, Lerner related how he found the spine of this difficult project in the last scene, when the appearance of a small boy managed to keep alive the dream of this shattered medieval utopia.
Maybe. But I would identify the crux far earlier in the action--specifically, in this love scene between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.
I had never seen Camelot--not the movie version with Richard Harris, not the 1980 revival with Burton as Arthur, not even a high-school or community-theater version--until I watched a marvelous performance at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., in the summer of 2000. As I watched this small-scale, almost chamber version, the beauty of this majestic melody hit me full force--as well as a greater appreciation of the all-too-brief, disrupted intimacy between Arthur, his queen, and his good and trusted friend.
The song caps a period in which Lancelot is transformed from a popinjay into a knight of unsurpassed valor and purity. When he was first inspired to come to the court of the king, it was easy for everyone to dismiss this tall, handsome narcissist. (Think Alex Rodriguez joining the New York Yankees.)
But an incident of derring-do leads Arthur, then Guinevere, to accept him, and the egotistical knight now discovers values and people larger and worthier than himself. By the conclusion of this soaring pledge of love and loyalty to the end to Guinevere, he has decisively won audience sympathy, too. Lancelot’s discovery of the best in Arthur and Guinevere, then, renders all the more tragic the affair that ruptures the friendship and marriage and destroys the kingdom.
Whether knowingly or not, Lerner hints at the destruction to come with one word in the song: “bewitched.” Maybe he added it to indicate how enthralled Lancelot was by Guinevere, or maybe he subconsciously recalled one of the great moments in American musical theater, Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
But the word also harks back to the fate of Merlin. After instructing the youthful Arthur in the importance of peace and brotherhood, the monarch’s magician--one of his “wise men”--fell under the spell of the nymph Nimue into eternal sleep.
Far better than they could ever have realized, the creators of Camelot were foretelling that even the most rational of men--the “best and the brightest”--could run afoul of instincts they were powerless to resist. That, in turn, led to a kind of secret, underground history that resulted in disorder, disillusionment and tragedy--both in Arthurian England and 1960s America.
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