the vantage point of number mode, which has the lilt of song
and dance.
The Case of Henry Higgins
Love duets are worth considering because most musicals have
them while most real people don’t. Most characters in legiti-
mate drama don’t sing duets, either. The love duet is a specialty
of musical theatre—full-blown and integrated in opera (again,
Tristan und Isoldeis the culmination) and inserted into nearly
every Broadway show. Most lovers in opera and operetta are
aware of themselves as lovers and share their melodies and har-
monies intentionally and successfully. But a little twist favored
by musicals makes true lovers unaware they are in love. This is
the Sky Masterson/Miss Sarah Brown variety, but Loesser was
borrowing an idea from Oscar Hammerstein, who never tired
of using it. The classic example is “If I Loved You,” from
Carousel, where hero and heroine fall in love while they sing
about the hypothesis of falling in love (the germ of this is in
Molnar’s Liliom, the source play). Hammerstein used the same
idea twenty years earlier in the “Make Believe” duet shared be-
tween Magnolia and Gaylord in Show Boat. It occurs again in
“People Will Say We’re in Love” in Oklahoma!
The need for little twists and variations comes from the dan-
ger of blandness that lurks in the love duet. The way Bernstein
disguises the AABA form of “Tonight” reminds us that there
is something to disguise, a danger of pop tune conventionality
strangling what is supposed to be unique passion. Before the
advent of the better book, this was not much of a problem, for
the affairs were rarely unique or passionate, and the standard-
form duet would be an exercise in bright cynicism and danc-
ing. “It’s got to be love, it couldn’t be tonsillitis,” sing the lovers
in On Your Toes, and since they were Ray Bolger and Doris
Carson originally, the sharp lyric sets up some even sharper
dancing. They are believable lovers mainly because they can
present their mutuality in tap.