My Fair Lady

Original Broadway Cast

Often described as the perfect musical, My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, turned into a book by Alan Jay Lerner and with music by Frederick Loewe. When the show opened on Broadway in 1956, it was hard to imagine any actors other than Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle (although the roles had originally been offered to Noel Coward and Mary Martin respectively), so convincing were they in the roles. The show would go on to run for 2,717 performances whilst the cast recording was a major hit, topping the British charts for 19 weeks during the course of its three years on the chart.