time, and lets them extend their characters musically. Those
who do not sing and dance are lesser characters. They stand
out because they have no music. They are like the psychoana-
lyst in Lady in the Darkor the Narrator in Into the Woods, a bit
weird for lacking song, a bit off-center. (Sondheim has a good
joke with this off-center narrator by having him fed to the Gi-
antess in act 2.) The larger characters are capable of living in
two worlds, one belonging to the book, the other belonging to
the numbers, and the musical is a complex form of drama be-
cause it welcomes the challenge of presenting both of those
worlds as though they were real and normal, and as though
characters able to switch from the book mode to the number
mode were real and normal, too. They aren’t, but we are glad
to think they are.
The Voice of the Musical
I mentioned Joseph Swain’s point that Higgins sounds like
Eliza in his interlude, “I can see her now.” How does this hap-
pen? The melody switches into the minor mode and remains
virtually confined to the first four notes of the scale. This is
also true of the first segment of Eliza’s “Just You Wait, ’enry
’iggins.” Both characters have to get over the anger expressed
in these segments, and their angry reactions are musically sim-
ilar. I would add that the first four notes of Higgins’s “I’ve
Grown Accustomed to Her Face” are identical to the first four
notes of the bridge (the B section) in Eliza’s “I Could Have
Danced All Night.” A three-note rise covers the first three dia-
tonic tones of the scale, followed by a leap to the fifth tone.
These two share a hidden romantic motif as well as a penchant
for anger. One way to think about such similarity is to say that
lovers have an underlying similarity no matter how different
they appear to be on the surface. Another way, which does not
eliminate the first way, is to say that the characters are influ-
encing one another through their songs. Higgins is supposed
to be creating a new character for Eliza, but this relationship