The “My Fair Lady” Project – Part 1

My Fair Lady Cast Album by Al Hirschfield-the album I grew up with!

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!

If All The World’s A Stage, What Are Your Theater Memories?

Taking a few days off from the lab the days before Thanksgiving gave us an extended period to work on our first puzzle of the season. From the three I had recently ordered, I chose “Broadway, The Musicals,” a tapestry of tens (hundreds?) of Broadway shows.

The puzzle wasn’t the most difficult we have tackled, and we were able to free up our kitchen table/puzzle space in plenty of time to have the whole family seated at the table Saturday night for 2nd Thanksgiving (akin to 2nd Seder but without the matzah.)

We ended up missing half a dozen pieces, a shortcoming we attribute to Cooper’s nasty habit of gobbling up any piece hanging over the table edge. Even so, we had a pretty good sense of what show or personality each rectangle was demonstrating.

There were lots of musicals we have seen and enjoyed: a handful on Broadway (Phantom, revivals of Hair and Oklahoma!), a few (Wicked, Les Miserables, A Chorus Line, Blue Man Group) downtown or in the city, too many to count at the Marriott Lincolnshire, and even one (42nd Street) at sea. And in the left lower quadrant I got a reminder to order tickets for The Music Man when it opens on Broadway with Hugh Jackman as Professor Harold Hill.

My favorite–the greatest of all American musicals, My Fair Lady— somehow didn’t make the cut, but maybe someday I will find a loverly puzzle of just Liza, ‘enry ‘iggins, and the rest of the gang. No Hamilton either, making our kitchen the only Lin-Manuel Miranda Free Zone in the Chicago metro area.

So do you see any of your favorites in the puzzle? Leave a comment–think of it as a tribute to Steven Sondheim. Are there some obscure shows highlighted that we might not have recognized? And what are your favorite theater memories? Shows you have seen, shows you have performed in your high school or later days, shows you can’t get enough of? Tell me all about it.

Looking forward to reading your comments on the blog or on Facebook. To quote the Bard:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
~William Shakespeare

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Rap on the Tony’s

Watched some Tony’s last night
Found it real satisfyin’
Lots of winners in New York
High flyin’, laughing, cryin’.

Yeah James Corden was the man
Who this year was doing the hosting
Back in Twenty-Oh-Twelve
His own Tony he was toasting.

Broadway sound is really changing
I guess “Hamilton‘s” behind it
Catch the beat, sing it out
Catch the story, unwind it.

Color Purple got some love
It’s not a new story
Just get Oprah on the stage
And relive some old glory.

I liked a cool new bit
Broadway casts on the veranda
Singing other people’s shows
Got Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Then got to hear our fave
“One Day More” – Les Misérables
It got sung in Corden’s car
Heads were rockin’ like some bobbles.

Barbra Streisand closed the show
Many years since she’s on Broadway
Funny Girl in sixty four
To great things it was her hallway.

We’ll Shuffle Along
Say good-bye to all of thou now
Cause the show went overtime
But for me it’s ciao ciao now.

__________________________

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