CameLot - Stratford Festival

Alan JayLernerBook and LyricsFrederickLoeweMusicBorn in New York City on August 31, 1918, librettistand lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was one of three sonsof Joseph J. Lerner, founder of a chain of women’sclothing stores. He was educated in England andat the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut,before attending Harvard University and theJuilliard School of Music. Graduating from Harvardin 1940, he began his professional career writingadvertising copy and radio scripts.Composer Frederick Loewe was born in Berlin,Germany, on June 10, 1904, the son of a wellknownViennese operetta tenor. Already playingthe piano by ear by the age of four, Loewe laterattended a musical conservatory in Berlin, wherehe won its coveted Hollander Medal. In 1925,Loewe moved to New York, where, despite someinitial engagements, his performing career failedto take off. In the Depression years that followed,he worked not only as a piano player and musicteacher but also as a cafeteria busboy, a ridinginstructor, a prize-fighter, a gold miner and amailman, before beginning to establish himselfas a composer for the stage. His musical GreatLady opened on Broadway in 1938 but ran for onlytwenty performances.In 1942, Loewe met Lerner by chance in Lambs,a New York actors’ and writers’ club. Thus beganan eighteen-year partnership that would result insome of the most celebrated of American musicals.The pair’s first Broadway show, What’s Up?, openedin 1943 but ran for only sixty-three performances.Their next, The Day Before Spring, lasted for fivemonths in 1945, but they did not begin to makemusical-theatre history until two years later, whenBrigadoon ran for 581 performances on Broadwayand was named best musical by the New YorkDrama Critics Circle.Lerner next wrote Love Life, a play with musicby Kurt Weill that was selected as one of thebest plays of the 1948-49 Broadway season, andthe screenplay for the film An American in Paris,which won an Oscar in 1951. That same year, hecollaborated with Loewe on another musical, PaintYour Wagon, and in 1956 the pair completed MyFair Lady. Their film Gigi was released in 1958;composer Frederick Loewe (left) and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner.(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)its stage version debuted on Broadway in 1973.Camelot, their last musical together, premièred inToronto in 1960 before opening on Broadway.Loewe, who had suffered a heart attack in 1958,retired after Camelot, though he wrote the score forthe 1972 film The Little Prince and in 1973 reunitedbriefly with Lerner to write four new songs for thestage version of Gigi. Lerner continued to work withother composers but never achieved the successhe had with Loewe.Lerner died on June 14, 1986, and Loewe onFebruary 14, 1988.11