I Could Have Danced All Night (My Fair Lady)

Lerner and Loewe took on Pygmalion after Rodgers and Hammerstein and others had given it up as unadaptable, and after years in which Shaw's estate refused permission. My Fair Lady opened on Broadway in March 1956 with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, set a record for the longest run of any musical to that date, and won six Tony Awards. Harrison, who could not sing in the ordinary sense, forced Loewe into a half-spoken idiom that became part of the show's character. The numbers stay inside Shaw's argument about class and speech, so dialogue and song pass into each other.