Overture

The other day a colleague of mine asked me what my favorite Broadway show was. My instantaneous response was My Fair Lady, the Lerner and Loewe musical retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I was probably listening to the original cast album before I could talk–and indeed, my first conception of a God was the puppetmaster on the album cover. It was not until many years later that I realized that my first diety was a sketch of Shaw himself. British actor “Sexy Rexi” Harrison, and the young and wonderfully pre-Mary Poppins / pre-Maria Von Trapp, Julie Andrews led the Broadway cast and the cast album.

Barb and I have seen major productions of the musical twice. Richard Chamberlain led a less-than-stellar production in Chicago in 1993. In contrast, we enjoyed a more recent Broadway production starring Harry Hadden-Paton, Lauren Ambrose, and Norbert Leo Butz. This production received some notoriety for presenting a post #MeToo attitude to the story of Henry Higgins, a British gent who takes cockney flower girl Liza Doolittle under his wing in 1900s London.

And now I have chosen to make the song list from the original cast album a framework for my next several blog posts. No, don’t worry, I am not going to just be writing about each song–I am not a music critic. But I will use each song title and perhaps a lyric or two as a launching point for whatever it is I want to spiel about on a given day–be it politics, medicine, history, or just plain navel-gazing.

It’s appropriate to start with the Overture. It comes first, it gives a glimpse of what is to come. And with this Overture blog, you now know what I will be up to in the next few weeks.

We will see how this goes. Let me know if you enjoy the concept–one advantage of the new WordPress blog site is that you can leave comments without using Facebook. And look forward to the next post. I don’t yet know what it will be about, but I can predict the title will be “Why Can’t the English?” Stay tuned!