My Fair Lady: Special Edition

George Cukor’s all-singing movie version of George Bernard Shaw’s much more nuanced Pygmalion was a smash success, winning eight Oscars (including 1965’s Best Picture), and one of the most commercially successful musicals ever made. It’s still a remarkable piece of entertainment, though it seems fairly dated forty years down the road. The costuming is terrific, as is Audrey Hepburn. Nobody was ever as good at playing sad lost waifs, and she’s perfect as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flowergirl who desperately wants to escape the London slums by learning a “proper” English accent from the grumpy linguist Henry Higgins. On the downside, there’s Rex Harrison’s too-convincing performance as the petulant, sexist Higgins—and worse, the bizarre decision to change Shaw’s original father-daughter relationship between the two leads to an implied romantic one. But the make-or-break quality of a musical is the songs, and My Fair Lady rewards us with a solid set of classic Broadway showstoppers…even if to our tastes they do go on and on. (Yes, Audrey, you could have danced all night; you don’t have to sing about it all night too.)