Tales from the Stave

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Series that tracks down the stories behind the scores of well-known pieces of music

Tales from the Stave: My Fair Lady - Lerner and Loewe

My Fair Lady - Lerner and Loewe

BBC Radio 4 - Tales from the Stave, My Fair Lady - Lerner and Loewe

The Musical My Fair Lady is celebrated through the manuscripts on which it was created.

The singer Christine Andreas and Broadway MD Ted Sperling gather at the Library of Congress in Washington DC to explore the music manuscripts of the smash musical hit My Fair Lady.

My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is perhaps the most successful musical of the golden age of the genre.  When it was created in the 1950s it brought together not only the librettist Lerner and the composer Loewe, but also Broadway's best arrangers and orchestrators as well as the performing brilliance of the leads who brought it to the stage, Dame Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison.  
The manuscripts of the collections of both Lerner and Loewe, now housed at the Library of Congress, give a unique insight into this creative journey that lasted from 1952 to 1956.  In a programme recorded as the Covid 19 crisis loomed on the horizon, Christine Andreas who sang the role of Eliza Doolittle in the official Broadway 20th anniversary production of the show, and Ted Sperling who was the MD of the latest award winning version that ran until 2019, are shown the way classic numbers like 'Just You Wait' and 'I could have danced all night' were honed and perfected.  With the guidance of scholar Dominic McHugh and library curator Mark Horowitz, they also get to see numbers that were crafted, perfected and then cut as the final production prepared for its Broadway opening.

Producer:  Tom Alban

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My Fair Lady - Lerner and Loewe

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