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Chapter 2 discusses the genesis of My Fair Lady from 1954 up to opening night in 1956. It includes an explanation of how Herman Levin came to be the producer, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway the male stars, Julie Andrews the female lead, and Moss Hart the director. It also charts Lerner and Loewe’s final struggles to bring the show to the stage, with contractual problems and troubles in finding a production team. The chapter ends with the successful reviews of the opening night performance in March 1956.

This chapter explores the most successful years of the Lerner and Loewe partnership. In particular, it looks at the weeks leading up to and following the premiere of My Fair Lady, as well as the composition of Gigi. It also reveals how much Lerner and Loewe struggled to find a project to work on after the Broadway blockbuster My Fair Lady.

My Fair Lady was a phenomenon, running for almost seven years on Broadway, with 2,717 performances. It held the long-run record for musicals, had spun off more foreign productions than any other show, and had simply become the summoning title in any discussion of hit musicals. This raises the question of why My Fair Lady seem to embody the brilliance and beauty of the American musical in a way that no other title was thought to. Critic Ken Mandelbaum says that the show's heavily English background gave it what we might call “intelligentsia control”. At the time, musicals were looked upon by some as entertainment for the tired businessman; those who felt then that musicals were not on the same artistic plane as the best plays and who were ashamed of adoring The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, or Li'l Abner felt safe raving about Fair Lady because it was not just a Broadway musical but also a play by Shaw.

Hermes Pan was hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to stage Cleopatra’s monumental procession into Rome for the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. Finishing business at Choreo Enterprises, Inc., a record company Pan established with Fred Astaire, Hermes moved to Rome where he lived and worked for nearly a year. Returning to Hollywood he was hired to choreograph the film version of My Fair Lady directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. He returned to television to stage “Think Pretty” and The Hollywood Palace for Fred Astaire before heading off the Las Vegas with his assistant Jerry Jackson to choreograph the centennial edition of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Hotel. At Astaire’s request, Francis Ford Coppola hired Pan to stage the dances for Finian’s Rainbow at Warner Brothers but fired him before the picture was finished.

This chapter starts to analyze the musical numbers that were used in My Fair Lady. It provides a discussion of the different types of musical sources available for the show—including arrangers’ scores, copyists’ scores, orchestrators’ scores, and the composer’s scores—and explains how they can be employed to reconstruct the creative processes involved in writing the music. It also discusses different ways of analyzing the implications of these processes, including possibly reasons for adding, removing or changing material. The focus of the chapter is the sources for the songs performed by Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, which hint at the theme of romantic ambiguity (as introduced in Chapter 3).

This chapter continues the analytical agenda of Chapter 5 in examining the different types of musical sources in relation to the score of My Fair Lady in order to give rise to new interpretations of the musical numbers. This chapter focuses on the songs of Alfred Doolittle, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and the ensemble pieces.

This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor at the end of the Golden Age, including My Fair Lady (1964), for which Cukor won an Academy Award as best director. My Fair Lady was produced by the last great studio mogul, Jack Warner, who was determined to recapture Warner Brothers’s glory as well as his own. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, it starred Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins. Marni Nixon was chosen to “double” Hepburn’s voice, a decision that devastated the actress. Roughly from 1963 to 1973, Cukor directed three films under his own G-D-C productions: Peter Pan, Nine-Tiger Man, and The Bloomer Girl. Abroad, particularly in France, by the mid-1960s, Cukor’s films were being saluted by film historians and scholars. The influential Cahiers du Cinema, for example, thoroughly admired his work.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of the 1950s. The era was marked by the death of the revue with the advent of television; the collaborations between Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green; the expansion of musical power and juggling of the formal conventions; and classic musicals that are infinitely revivable without revision such as Guys and Dolls (1950), My Fair Lady (1956), and West Side Story (1957).

This chapter examines Lerner’s time at MGM and the early genesis of My Fair Lady. It includes correspondence with Gabriel Pascal, who owned the rights to a musical version of Shaw’s Pygmalion; with Arthur Freed, who produced Lerner’s MGM projects; with the record producer Goddard Lieberson; and with Arthur Schwartz, the composer with whom Lerner collaborated after severing ties with Frederick Loewe. It ends with an exploration of the early genesis of My Fair Lady and an extensive letter to Rex Harrison, the show’s star.

When Goddard Lieberson assumed the role of executive vice president at Columbia Records in the mid-1940s, he established the greatest powerhouse for the recording of Broadway material in the twentieth century. Lieberson produced studio versions of unrecorded Broadway classics; acquired and produced some of the biggest hit albums of the 1950s and 60s; and oversaw a battalion of single releases of Broadway material for the pop charts. He also masterminded the initiatives of the Columbia Record Club and the advent of stereo, both of which enabled additional revenue streams for Broadway material. Lieberson’s masterwork was the cast album of My Fair Lady, released originally in mono, then rerecorded in stereo; it became one of the most ubiquitous and successful albums of all time.

This chapter concentrates on the cinematographic style of Cukor's work, at the same time acknowledging the films' resistance to scholarly analysis as well as their formal restraint. It outlines some of the challenges to analysis that Cukor's films present, and the limitations of the received criticism, before examining a range of diverse titles to see what can be discovered about their formal character. Specifically, the chapter points to particular modulations of the shot that prove characteristic for Cukor's cinema, related to their realistic texture and canny framings. This analysis thus finds fresh affinities across Cukor's oeuvre, extending from the early projects What Price Hollywood? (1932) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935) to the commercial successes of Born Yesterday (1950) and My Fair Lady (1964).

This chapter charts the constantly fraught relationship between musical theatre and musical film—mutually dependent, often hazardous, sometimes respectful, occasionally disastrous. It considers musicals from The Desert Song in late 1928 to Anything Goes and Show Boat in 1936, to Annie Get Your Gun and My Fair Lady and Evita and onward to Les Miz. The chapter then examines the difficulties—and potential rewards—in adapting theatrical shows onto film. The chapter looks at the problem of too much fidelity or too little, the question of how many songs should be retained, problems related to length, the conflicts between realism and stylization, and the relative merits of perceived staginess versus those of cinematic potential.

In 1962, Cole recorded the blockbuster hit “Ramblin’ Rose” and three full-length albums as well as his successful “singalong” album, Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer. However, there was also trouble. His new management led him into a disastrous deal that was financially devastating, and his intimate relationship with a young singer in his touring backup group threatened his marriage. Artistically, he recorded two well-received albums, Where Did Everyone Go? and Nat King Cole Sings My Fair Lady. By summer 1964, Nat knew he was sick; he made his final film appearance, in Cat Ballou; completed his last album, L-O-V-E; and fulfilled an important engagement in San Francisco. In December, he received his diagnosis and checked into St. John’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the values of theatrical liberalism caught the imagination of Jewish social scientists, who found it useful for explaining everyday behavior. At the same time, a newly emerging Jewish ethnic pride led to a celebration of “authentic” Jewishness in popular culture. This chapter explores the tension between these two impulses in the work of Erving Goffman, Sid Caesar's early television sketches, and the musicals My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof. The debates over theatricality and authenticity reached a peak in the later 1960s and 1970s as theatrical activity spilled off of stages and screens, and boundaries between audiences and performers disintegrated.

Henry James’s seemingly misplaced fascination with the theater has long been recognized. Less appreciated, however, has been the theater’s (sometimes misplaced) fascination with Henry James. While a handful of successful adaptations of his works have been analyzed by James scholars, the spectacular failure of the most astonishing of them has gone unremarked. The fantastic notion of employing The Ambassadors as the platform for a Broadway musical originated with no less a figure than James Thurber; but the ill-fated task of fulfilling that dubious dream was left to others now forgotten. Chapter 6 resurrects their remarkable ambition, their fleeting success, and their ultimate failure.