My Fair Lady

Henry Higgins is an eccentric professor of phonetics who believes in the power of proper speech. When he meets the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, he is drawn into a wager: though the quick-witted Eliza is anything but tongue-tied, she speaks the rough dialect of the London working class – which, according to Higgins, will condemn her to the gutter for life. The phonetician is convinced he can make something of Eliza: he wants to teach the young woman perfect articulation and bets that he can thus slip her unnoticed into the highly formal Diplomatic Ball. With this madcap coup in mind, a momentous social experiment begins, in which it is not only Eliza who looks into the mirror of society... “My Fair Lady” became an overnight hit on Broadway in 1956 and, thanks to its catchy tunes such as “The Rain in Spain”, remains one of the most popular musicals of all time, even in its 70th anniversary year.