The five songs that were cut before rehearsals include a tune called "Lady Liza," sung by Higgins and his buddy Colonel Hugh Pickering "Please Don't Marry Me," a lament for Higgins and "Shy," in which Eliza confesses she has feelings for her professor. But that song didn't go to waste Lerner and Loewe recycled it for their musical Gigi a few years later. And when she finally completes the lessons, she sings a little ditty - "Say a Prayer for Me Tonight," which was also cut - to buck herself up. At one point, the script called for Higgins to be standing above her symbolically with a whip (glad they cut that). (In the audio link above, it is performed with the original orchestral arrangements for the first time since that performance.) By the end of the song, Eliza is willing to continue.Īnd there follows a dream ballet - a nightmare, really - in which she resists her lessons.
The song that followed, "Come to the Ball," was performed exactly once by Rex Harrison at that first preview 59 years ago. She was ready to quit her lessons, so linguistics professor Henry Higgins, played by Nathan Spencer at the University of Sheffield, enticed her with visions of triumphs to come. It came right after flower girl Eliza Doolittle made her disastrous debut at the Ascot Races. My Fair Lady is a musical based on George Bernard Shaws 1913 play Pygmalion, with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. If you want an audience to beg for more, you can't actually dance all night, so after the very first preview in New Haven, Conn., the composers cut another 15 minutes of material. Then it was reworked for Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, and by the time it got into rehearsal five songs had already been cut. Among the glittering ornaments of the season, count the ravishing revival of My Fair Lady now adorning the Kennedy Center’s Opera House stage. My Fair Lady was first conceived as a vehicle for Mary Martin, but she didn't want to do it. On Tuesday night, England's University of Sheffield hosted a performance of seven songs that were dropped from the musical before its Broadway opening, some of which were being heard in public for the first time in almost 60 years. The musical, based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, is filled to bursting with some of the best-known songs in Broadway history - "The Rain In Spain," "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," "On the Street Where You Live" - but it turns out the show originally had other tunes that almost nobody knows. When a Broadway musical feels as effortlessly right as Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's did to audiences in 1956, it's easy to imagine that it simply sprang to life that way. The production features Tony-winning costume design by Catherine Zuber.
Julie Andrews starred as flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway premiere of My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady is directed by Bartlett Sher, choreographed by Christopher Gattelli and music-directed by Ted Sperling.
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