Jonathan Grunert as Professor Henry Higgins, Madeline Powell as Eliza Doolittle, John Adkison as Colonel Pickering – The National Tour of MY FAIR LADY. And despite his bullying and his flashes of heartlessness, she works diligently to achieve her dream. It is she who comes to Higgins to request speech lessons after he says, in their first encounter in Covent Garden, that in six months he could “pass her off as a duchess” or find work for her in a shop, “which requires better English.” It is Eliza’s determination to one day be “a lady in a flower shop” that brings her to Higgins’ door. But My Fair Lady is more complex: Eliza is the driving force. ![]() But in traditional Cinderella stories, the heroine is the recipient of magic and good fortune: a fairy godmother enables her, a prince sees her and falls in love. My Fair Lady is often referred to as a Cinderella story because, at least figuratively, it’s a rags-to-riches tale: Eliza goes from being a “guttersnipe” to a woman mistaken for a princess. As Higgins says in both works (with just a few minor changes), “What could possibly matter more than to take a human being and change her into a different human being by creating a new speech for her? Why, it’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class, soul from soul.” Lerner, who wrote the book as well as the lyrics, borrowed liberally – and sometimes verbatim – from Shaw. For Lerner, My Fair Lady was squarely about the relationship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, but Shaw’s perspective infuses much of the musical. In his preface to Pygmalion, the funny, wickedly insightful play (1913) that inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s beloved musical My Fair Lady, Shaw made the claim that his work about a professor who transforms a Cockney flower girl into a lady was essentially about phonetics. Cameron Loyal as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in The National Tour of MY FAIR LADY. ![]() O’Neil as Harry in The National Tour of MY FAIR LADY. Richard Coleman as Harry, Michael Hegarty as Alfred P. Madeline Powell as Eliza Doolittle in The National Tour of MY FAIR LADY. Upward mobility, he believed, could only be achieved if one had the intelligence, tenacity, and commitment to learn how to speak “proper” English. It required much more than improving one’s apparel and appearance, though both of those were important. He understood that in England’s rigid class society, a truly life-changing transformation could not be attained passively. ![]() The great playwright George Bernard Shaw perhaps realized the ramifications of a makeover better than anyone. These external changes might seem superficial, but it’s apparent to anyone who’s ever caught an episode of “What Not to Wear” or “Queer Eye” that the experience tends to boost self-esteem and is usually empowering. If you doubt it, there have been more than a dozen reality TV shows and countless magazines – most, but not all, geared to women – showcasing the benefits of transformation: new clothes, new makeup, new grooming, new hairdo and, voila, a new you.
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