| My Fair Lady is a musical theater production with
lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederic Loewe, adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. The musical
opened on March 15, 1956 at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York City. It ran for 2717 performances, a Broadway record at the time. Moss Hart directed the
musical, Cecil Beaton designed the costumes, and Hanya Holm choreographed. The original Playbill and original
cast album included art by Al Hirschfeld, which depicted Eliza Doolittle
as a marionette being manipulated by Henry Higgins, whose own strings are being
pulled by a heavenly puppeteer who looks like George Bernard
Shaw.
The songs
- "Why Can't the English?"
- "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?"
- "With a Little Bit of Luck"
- "I'm an Ordinary Man"
- "The Servants' Chorus"
- "Just You Wait"
- "The Rain in Spain"
- "I Could Have Danced All Night"
- "Ascot Gavotte"
- "On the Street Where You Live"
- "You Did It"
- "Show Me"
- "Get Me to the Church On Time"
- "A Hymn to Him"
- "Without You"
- "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"
The plot
Henry Higgins, an arrogant, irascible professor of phonetics, finds an
impoverished young woman, Eliza Doolittle, selling flowers, and boasts to a new acquaintance that he can train her to speak so
"properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess. The woman finds the professor's house and offers to pay the professor to give
her elocution lessons so that she can get a better job.
The ending of the musical was subtly changed from that of the play, in order to please audiences by a suggestion of romance
between Eliza and Higgins.
A contemporary version of the Pygmalion motif can be found in Willy Russell's play Educating Rita (1980).
The cast
Harrison and Holloway reprised their roles in the film version, while Andrews was replaced by Audrey Hepburn and Robert Coote by Wilfrid Hyde-White.
The film
The stage musical was later made into a musical film, released in
1964 by Warner Bros.. The film was
directed by George Cukor, and starred Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. It won Cukor an Academy Award for Directing, and ranked #91 on the
American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies.
The lead role in the film was originally intended for Julie Andrews,
who played Eliza in the stage version. Hepburn was cast, despite lobbying from Lerner, because Warner Brothers didn't want to
cast a stage actress. Opera singer Marni Nixon was cast to dub Hepburn's
songs. Julie Andrews in fact became a screen star in her own right that same year in Mary Poppins. The controversy over the casting damaged Hepburn's career, painting her in a negative light
(although Elizabeth Taylor reportedly fought long and hard for the
role as well). Andrews' subsequent Academy Award nomination for Mary
Poppins, which she won - and lack of a nomination for Hepburn - was seen by many as vindication for Julie Andrews, though
both actresses denied that there was ever any animosity between them. Film of some of Hepburn's original vocal performances for
the film was released in the 1990s, and many fans of the actress believe that it was unnecessary for her voice to be dubbed.
The film's copyright is owned by CBS, as the head of that company put up the money for the
original Broadway production in exchange for the rights to the cast album (through Columbia Records). When Warners bought the film rights for the then-unprecedented sum of $5 million, it
was agreed that the rights to the film would revert to CBS seven years after its release. In the 1990s, the original film
elements had fallen into disrepair from heavy printing and were feared in danger of total deterioration. Film restorers Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz were brought in to
physically restore the film. Their work was a success, preserving this well-loved film for future generations, and a 30th
anniversary re-issue in 1994 reinforced the film's popularity.
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