Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady, was intrigued by the potential project. Loewe, skeptical at first, became caught up in Lerner and Hart’s enthusiasm, and agreed to join them in creating and producing the musical that would become Camelot.

The Once and Future King is a quartet of books published in one massive volume of more than 600 pages, loosely based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). The first book, The Sword in the Stone, recounts King Arthur’s boyhood; the second, The Witch in the Wood, introduces the idea of the Round Table. The next two books form the basis of the musical: The Ill-Made Knight, named for Lancelot, tells of his love triangle with King Arthur and Guenevere, and The Candle in the Wind marks the end of King Arthur’s reign amid revolts led by his son, Mordred.

It was the daunting task of Lerner and Loewe to musicalize the sprawling, vivid tale. Lerner respected Loewe’s incomparable “gift of pure classic melody” and its importance in conveying individual character and the overall musical journey in Camelot from “innocence to sophistication.”

As score and libretto unfolded, casting began. The first selection was Julie Andrews, still portraying Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in London, as Guenevere. Hart invited Richard Burton to play King Arthur. Six months into the creative process, only one role remained to be filled. In contrast to White’s depiction of “the ill-made knight,” dashing newcomer Robert Goulet, trained at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, was cast as Lancelot.

After almost two years of writing and rewriting, Camelot began a five-week rehearsal period in New York. The company next headed to Toronto, where both the show and the theatre it was to play in would be inaugurated a mere one week later. Although fully aware of the many acoustical and technical challenges normally inherent in a new theatre (and this one would prove no exception), the collaborators had accepted an offer to open what was then the O’Keefe Centre and is now the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. A particularly generous financial arrangement -– and, in Lerner’s words, a “total vacation from common sense” – prompted the decision.

The collaborators believed Toronto to be tucked far away from the watchful, critical eyes of Broadway. Yet prominent New York producer Alexander H. Cohen was in place as consultant for the building, operation and booking of the O’Keefe Centre. Anxious to display the new theatre for future consideration, Cohen invited a veritable theatrical who’s who to view it and the new musical.

On opening night, Hart welcomed the sold-out house with: “Camelot is lovely, Camelot is going to be glorious, Camelot is long. You’re going to be a lot older when you get out of here tonight.” The four-and-a-half hour performance proved him right, and the collaborators proceeded to excise at least one and a half hours while strengthening the musical’s clarity and structure. This work took its toll, hospitalizing Lerner with an ulcer, followed by Hart with a heart attack. Nonetheless, the gradually trimmed production played to full houses.

Lerner, now serving as director at Hart’s request, continued to grapple as writer with the vastness of the tale to be told in Camelot. He set a three-and-a-half-hour running time as the goal for the next opening at Boston’s Shubert Theatre. That goal was met, but Lerner – finding himself increasingly frustrated by the narrative challenge of progressing from the light romanticism of the first act to the darker drama of the second -– began to question his initial decision to tackle Camelot at all.

The breakthrough came when he realized that his entire motivation for telling the story sprang from the end of King Arthur’s journey after the loss of love, friend and Round Table. The appearance of the hopeful young boy wishing to become a knight, Lerner now saw, embodied the central theme of the show: that “men die but an idea does not.” Realizing that the key to Camelot was to make shorter the steps toward the conclusion of the journey, he launched into a rewrite of more than half of the first act, along with most of the second.

The arrival of Camelot at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre was welcomed by an extraordinary advance sale of almost two million dollars. Lerner remained at the helm while Hart recuperated in Toronto. After well-received previews, the show opened in New York on December 3, 1960. The reviews lavished more praise on the score than on the libretto, and three months later, Hart returned to the production to carry out further bits of rewriting, unprecedented at that point in a commercial run.

Along with Hart’s subtle changes, Camelot would benefit greatly from what Lerner termed “the miracle.” Ed Sullivan, the popular television variety show host, devoted his entire March 19, 1961, show to the celebration of My Fair Lady’s fifth anniversary. But the collaborators chose to present very little from My Fair Lady and instead highlighted Camelot’s best songs and scenes. Through the power of television, the theatre audience expanded exponentially, and Camelot became a stratospheric hit.

The Broadway run continued for two award-winning years, followed by numerous foreign productions and New York revivals. The successful film version received three 1968 Academy Awards.

Although Lerner and Loewe’s friendship remained steadfast, Camelot marked their final stage collaboration on new material.

The Broadway cast recording of Camelot was America’s top-selling album for sixty weeks in 1961. It also ranked as number one with President John F. Kennedy, for whom the recording, and especially the final number, provided cherished listening. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and to this day, his inspiring, all too brief time in office is symbolized as “Camelot.”

In turn, at the conclusion of Camelot, the idealism of the Round Table continues eternally, for as Lerner believed: ”there lies buried in its heart the aspirations of mankind.”

 

Don’t let it be forgot

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment that was known

As Camelot. . . .

 

Lois Kivesto, PhD, is the researcher for Canadian Stage in Toronto. 

 

The larger theme embodied in this story is civilization itself and how we deal with the fundamental challenge presented to it by human nature. The integrity of Arthur’s realm depends upon the rule of law that he has himself established; the dilemma he faces is whether to flout that law for the sake of love and friendship. And far from trivializing this theme, the musical form actually raises the stakes. Music, like the other arts, is itself a civilizing element in human life – and the dream of civilization, the “big idea” of Camelot, is built into this musical’s score: everybody sings about it.

We live in a time when fundamental questions about the rule of civil law are very much in our minds. Is it the best way to govern? During the Bush administration in the United States, we saw a heated debate about the use of torture: could it be acceptable if it yielded information that could prevent a terrorist act? Arthur would say no. But Pellinore would be arguing with him: do we wait for someone to commit a terrible crime before we act?

I think the story of Camelot has endured, both as a legend and as a musical, because it acknowledges the difficulty of such questions, and admits the limitations of innocence and idealism, while still offering us the opportunity to believe that, in the end, it is civilization that we will choose.

 

His first appearance in the work of an English writer is in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the Kings of Britain), published in 1125. Twelve years later, Geoffrey of Monmouth included Arthur in his History of the Kings of Britain, and in 1155 Robert Wace’s adaptation of Monmouth’s account – Roman de Brut – added the Round Table to our stock of Arthurian lore.

Chrétien de Troyes, writing at the end of the twelfth century, brought Arthur out of the realm of putative history into that of romance. It was he who added to the story the element of chivalry: the medieval code that holds knights to a standard of religious, moral and social behaviour. In the thirteenth century, two German writers contributed further to the legend: Wolfram von Eschenbach with Parzifal, and Gottfried von Strassburg with Tristan, both of which were used in the nineteenth century by Richard Wagner as the bases for operas.

An anonymous poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, appeared in the fourteenth century, and in 1485 William Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which melded all the prior works about King Arthur into an epic romance unified by consistent themes, particularly the creation of an ideal society based on selfless virtue, with the Round Table as a symbol of equality and brotherhood.

In the Victorian era, Alfred, Lord Tennyson largely followed Malory in his twelve-poem cycle Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, but it was from a twentieth-century prose version of the story – T. H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King, published in 1958 – that the creators of Camelot drew their immediate inspiration. Writing from an anti-war stance, White scrubbed Arthur’s military exploits from the page and made him a great political thinker who creates the perfect society by translating his tutor’s moral lessons into a system of just governance.

Based primarily on the third and fourth books of White’s tetralogy, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind, Camelot nonetheless owes a debt to all those prior centuries of literary tradition -– and perhaps ultimately to some warlike Welshman whose name first became renowned a millennium and a half ago.

 

Shira Ginsler is Education and Editorial Coordinator for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 

 

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