The Making of My Fair Lady

by Keith Garebian

The common lament was Broadway will never be the same! when My Fair Lady finally ended its stellar run the night of Sunday, September 30, 1962. Millions of people had seen the show over six years and had helped break box-office records, even though Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway, and Robert Coote did not stay with the cast throughout the six-year run. MyFair Lady used the substance and wit of George Bernard Shaw to add a new dimension to the Broadway libretto.

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003).

Reviews

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably the strongest of all The Great Broadway Musicals series. It has the most production analysis. That being said it has a very unfortunate ending. Garebian's five page run down of musical theatre up to My Fair Lady is not so good. It ignore really big moments in musical theater history and quite frankly makes too much of My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady did change certain aspects of musical theater production and especially writing but I don't think it had as much influence as Garebian claimed. These are still good introductory texts but you can skip the history of musical theater section at the end of the book.

Also, these book really don't have conclusions and that kind of bothers me.