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Sir Aggravate & Friend. With Author Lerner, ulcer and all, doubling for sorely missed Director Hart but too busy re-writing to spend much time in the theater Camelot moved forward of its own weight, only slightly trimmed from its original 3 hr. 40 min., while the mood of the cast settled into general uncertainty. Knights were complaining that their chain mail was wearing out and tempers were wearing out too. When a dancer tripped over a piece of scenery last week, Set Designer Smith was heard to snap: "I hope you broke your leg." Novice squires were learning from cynical old-timers that this was the time to pursue chorus girls, since they were away from home, lonesome and worried. One reason spirits did not fall farther was that some were being consumed by the imperial quart, backstage and elsewhere, before, during and after each performance. More than one knight of the Round Table was caught breaking his vows. In semi-idleness, it hardly seemed like the idyled kingdom of Camelot.
Amid the confusion walked the two men who had started it, and who must end it in the next three weeks. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, said Julie Andrews, "are the loneliest men in town." Acting as their own producers, with $3,000,000 of other people's money and their own reputations to safeguard, they have to worry about everything from the color of Julie Andrews' hair (too light) to King Pellinore's visor (will not fall shut on cue) to the inner mists of the Arthurian theme.
Shut away in the Ritz-Carlton, Lerner fills Apartment 1004 with cigarette smoke and new lines for Camelot. Across the hall in another suite, his two-year-old son Michael listens to a phonograph not Lerner and Loewe, but Au Clair de la Lune. Up in 1204, Loewe ("Sir Aggravate," as Lerner nicknames him) broods under the fond eye of his current, 24-year-old girl friend; he calls her "baby boy," she calls him "baby bear." For hours each day, Lerner joins Loewe at the piano as they work together on four new songs, including one called The Seven Deadly Virtues, plus the problems of telescoping four Act I scenes into two, straightening out Act II, deepening Mordred's villainy all of which requires new lines, new musical bridges, and scenes long enough to allow complicated scene shifts. When he is not pounding the piano, Loewe fingers a piece of jade it once belonged to an Oriental potentate who said his beloved had always kept it as close as possible to her which serves Fritz as a sort of mineral Miltown.
And so the ordeal goes on. The outcome depends entirely on the strength and experience of two partners as dissimilar as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.