Song Lyric of the Day (Lerner and Loewe’s ‘Camelot,’ on ‘The Lusty Month of May’)

“Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes,
Ev'ryone breaks.
Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May!”—“The Lusty Month of May,” from the musical Camelot, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1960)
 
“Vows” are usually made in June, but if this witty Lerner and Loewe song—not to mention a couple of current events—is to be believed, certain privileged people have trouble living up to them for a full 12 months. Or, in the most recent case, two septuagenarian males who were lusty indeed in their younger and middle years.
 
In London this weekend, the place went mad over the coronation of King Charles III. The oath he took featured three major vows: that he would “govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland… according to their respective laws and customs”; that he would “cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgements”; and, most concretely if problematically, that he would “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England.”
 
His Highness, you might recall, had a bit of a problem back when he was still Prince of Wales, when he broke his marriage vows to Princess Diana by engaging in an affair with the woman who now gets to be known as Queen Camilla.
 
Here in the United States, another figure who would like similar deference (and gets it, but only from his own Republican Party) had his own problems with vows. 

In a deposition made public at a civil suit now entering what may be its final phase, this fellow (let’s call him the one bestowed on him by talk-show host Stephen Colbert a year and a half ago, “Tangerine Palpatine”--or, in a pinch, the "Florida Fondler") had trouble recalling that he took up with his second wife before he was done with his first.
 
More seriously, he consistently violated—though never so flagrantly as on Jan. 6, 2021—his solemn oath before the American people to “preserve, protest and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
We’d better hope that, unlike Camelot—indelibly associated with America’s youngest-elected President—“Tangerine Palpatine” doesn’t get revived, now or by a new generation at some point in the future.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Vanessa Redgrave performing “The Lusty Month of May” in the 1967 film adaptation of Camelot.)

Quote of the Day (T.H. White, As Merlin Warns Arthur About ‘Popular Agitators’ in His Kingdom)

“You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.” —English novelist T.H. White (1906-1964), The Once and Future King (1958)

Written like another epic with mythical overtones, The Lord of the Rings, during WWII, The Once and Future King became the basis of the musical Camelot. 

The image accompanying this post comes from the original 1960 Broadway production, with Richard Burton as reason-guided King Arthur and Roddy McDowall as Mordred, the conniving son who will become a stand-in for the “popular agitators” who put the realm at risk.

Song Lyric of the Day (“Camelot‘s” Lancelot, “Bewitched“ by Guinevere)

“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.