My Fair Lady

Aside from the original cast recording, I’ve been unimpressed with My Fair Lady in each of its incarnations.

I watched the movie many years ago, as a teenager — or started to. I turned it off because I was appalled by how, as I said then, “boring” it was. Years later, with a devoted love of Lerner’s and Loewe’s music and lyrics in place, as well as an abiding regard for director George Cukor, I must say that I agree with my adolescent assessment: it takes a special kind of creative indifference to be presented with songs like “Ordinary Man” and “The Street Where You Live” and to respond by cementing your camera to the ground.

Sure, Cukor is dutiful with the dialogue scenes, but he allows Audrey Hepburn to overact. Her dubbing is a true embarrassment; the few instances where her singing voice remains on the soundtrack are endearing, warbly and sweet. If they let Rex Harrison do it, they should’ve let their woman lead sound imperfect, too.

And that’s my rub with this show: Alan Jay Lerner’s adjustments to Bernard Shaw work to destroy Pygmalion’s proto-feminist underpinnings and reimagine it as a misogynist apologia. Efforts have been made to counteract these changes — e.g. the Lincoln Center revival with Lauren Ambrose, directed by Bartlett Sher, which has Eliza leaving Higgins in the end. (I saw this production and was unmoved.) But you still have garbage like the Princess of Transylvania lifting a silent and ornamental Miss Doolittle by the chin and muttering, “Charming.”

Nothing that I’ve seen compares to what I hear. The 1956 album has Julie Andrews, of course, and Mr. Harrison giving their all; its orchestrations are swift and energetic. I first started listening to the recording — made just one week after the musical’s Broadway premiere — during the pandemic, and it has remained one of my favorite albums ever since.

I think My Fair Lady is the perfect musical if one is speaking purely in terms of music and lyrics. Its songs are cinema all by themselves.