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Loewe thinks of music in terms of color, once turned out compositions that reflected what he saw on an artist's canvases. For visitors he will still improvise "colors" on the piano, turning out a peacock- blue sonata or red march from three notes offered him at random. Without lapsing into triteness or parody, he has an extraordinary ability to suggest geographical locale, whether it is Scotland, Spain, or the American West, which has never been more eloquently described in melody than in I Talk to the Trees from Paint Your Wagon. He is sometimes accused of being derivative, but this is rarely the case. Preparing for Wagon, as Singer David Brooks recalls it, Lerner played a record of Ghost Riders in the Sky for Fritz over and over again, then Loewe sent one more ghost into the air and a far better one by writing his superb They Call the Wind Maria. "I never try to write a hit song." he says. "If you do, it is always silly, or Irving Berlin."
Lerner's Parsifal. In adapting T. H. White's The Once and Future King the whole glorious frieze of Arthurian legend and the Middle Ages spread by a writer with the rarely combined gifts of levity, scholarship and poetry Lerner and Loewe have unquestionably taken on the greatest and heaviest theme that has ever been attempted in the field of musical comedy (Loewe tried to read the book, did not finish it). Treated seriously, the story could only be a musical tragedy, about a king who loses his wife to his best friend, loses his life under the sword of a bastard son born as the result of a union between the king and his own sister, and loses his state a political ideal called Gamelot to the besetting sin of its principal inhabitants.
So it was not exactly a pajama game. As Mark Twain and Rodgers & Hart had done with Connecticut Yankee, one method would have been to mock the legend with pure comedy. Others have played it straight an impressive list that includes Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace. Layamon, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and now Alan Jay Lerner. In Camelot, he necessarily left out some of the legend's great characters: Sir Kay the Seneschal, Tristram and Isolde, Elaine the lily-maid of Astolat, even Sir Galahad, the squarest knight at the Round Table.
On the road last week, critics, actors and audiences were wondering if he had left out even more. Did the major themes politics and adultery really come together in the end? In handling the triangle subtly and tastefully, had he lost too much emotional conviction? Some felt that Camelot begins on Broadway and ends in Bayreuth; phrasemakers are already calling the show "Lerner's Parsifal."
In The Once and Future King, T. H. White managed to darken the theme as gently as the coming of evening. White had 677 pages and Lerner has but three hours. In Camelot, Lerner moves from comedy to tragedy as if he were blowing out a candle. Another problem is that Lerner seems to stop shy of the most tragic moments not only Arthur's death but Guinevere's trial and rescue, which, in the script as it stood last week, was only related in an awkward "standup oratorio." Perhaps L. & L.'s biggest problem is to find a way of telling this climactic scene visually or dramatically.