On March 15, 1956-50 years ago today Broadway had the kind of night that makes up for all the others.

At 8:30 at the Mark Hellinger Theater, at Broadway and 51st Street in New York City, My Fair Lady opened with so much excitement that it took six years for the street to calm down and the house lights to go off. The play, billed as
“a musical comedy adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion,” didn’t exactly sneak into town. During the weeks leading up to the opening, everyone around seemed to know that it was destiny’s boffo everyone except Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics. As opening day approached, he was certain something disastrous was about to happen.

Lerner wasn’t oblivious of the signals all around him. He saw the long lines of people waiting to buy advance tickets at the box office. He read the articles in the papers heralding the show and marveling at its wit. He heard about the people flying in from Europe just for the opening. “No play on earth,” he said to himself, “could equal so much expectation.”

The idea for the show came from a movie producer named Gabriel Pascal, who was Hungarian by birth. In the 1930s he had gone to Ireland and approached George Bernard Shaw with the idea of making a movie of Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Shaw had never sold film rights for his works before. In Pascal’s case, he relented. “I talked dramatic art with him,” Pascal explained to The New York Times, “I spoke his spirit.”

Privately, Pascal had another version of the story. Showing up uninvited at Shaw’s home, he was taken into the playwright’s office. “How much money do you have?” Shaw asked brusquely. By way of an answer, Pascal searched
his pockets and held out whatever coins he could find. “You’re the first honest film producer I’ve ever met!” Shaw said triumphantly. The resulting 1938 film, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, was well-received, even by Shaw. The movie was something of a landmark, escorting Shaw and his Edwardian characters into the middle of the century and without any of the self-consciousness that would accompany a mere period piece. To a generation of moviegoers, Shaw’s characters were anything but arcane; they were amusing, truthful, and perfectly modern.

In 1952 Pascal called on Alan Lerner, saying that Pygmalion should be turned into a musical and that in his opinion the only ones who could write it were Lerner and his collaborator, Frederick Loewe. Pascal may have been an honest film producer, but he was rather more light-footed as a theatrical producer, neglecting to mention that Rodgers and Hammerstein had already turned him down. Lerner and Loewe weren’t as bankable as Rodgers and Hammerstein no one ever would be but they had written Brigadoon, which was approximately three-quarters of a great musical, and it was readily apparent that they were brimming with further potential. Lerner and Loewe eventually took on the assignment and began to retune the play as a musical. By 1955 they had three songs finished.

“It was in the summer of 1955, while I was in the middle of the London run of Bell, Book, and Candle, that three gentlemen can to see me about a musical with the tentative title of Lady Liza,” the actor Rex Harrison recalled. The three gentlemen were Lerner, Loewe, and a producer, Herman Levin. Harrison hated two of the songs. “The only number that really whizzed along, when they first arrived,” he wrote, “was ‘The Rain in Spain’ . . . and it was obviously a great one.”

Harrison dallied for weeks but eventually agreed to play Professor Henry Higgins. His casting was crucial, even before rehearsals began or tickets were printed. There was something in the uniquely light but potent Harrison personality that inspired Lerner and gave him a vivid model to work with not only for Higgins but even for characters in subsequent shows, ones in which Harrison had no part.

Rex Harrison had the acting ability for Higgins, but his genius in the role came with a price. His nerves got the better of him during the New Haven preview, and he announced a few hours before curtain that he couldn’t go on; the show would have to be postponed for two days. No one knew quite what to do.

Alan Lerner had no sway over Harrison and neither had Fritz Loewe. The producers were afraid of him. Moss Hart, the director, was both august and street-smart, but he couldn’t tell Rex Harrison what to do. The only one left was the manager of the theater in New Haven, a beleaguered businessman whose livelihood came down to two things on that snowy February night a lobby filling with patrons and an English leading man telling him to refund all their money. The manager went backstage and hissed that if the show didn’t start, he would ruin Harrison’s reputation from one end of the earth to the other.

One wouldn’t have thought that theater managers in Connecticut had quite that much power, but all of a sudden Harrison changed his mind. He went on as Higgins. And he needn’t have been nervous; he was a hit, and so was the show. After causing a stir in New Haven and pandemonium in Philadelphia, My Fair Lady arrived in New York. There was to be one preview before the opening night. All the while, Fritz Loewe was euphoric, giving champagne soirees for the chorus girls. An inveterate gambler, he was enjoying a sure thing when he had one.

Alan Jay Lerner, on the other hand, was pessimistic and miserable, explaining to anyone who would commiserate that during each performance the “feeling of exposure” was acute. No doubt it was, but after the preview a friend tried to snap him out of it, even shaking him by the elbows. “Listen to me,” she said, “What is happening in this theater is incredible. It is something that has happened to few people and will never happen to you again. So for Christ’s sake, stop worrying and enjoy it. Do you hear me Enjoy it!” He didn’t. He was too busy worrying which was, in the end,
one of the reasons that no one in an audience at My Fair Lady has ever had to worry at all.

Opening night tickets were hard to get Marlene Dietrich had one and the audience was just a bit wary at first. But Stanley Holloway’s worldly rendition of “With a Little Bit of Luck” lifted the place up. The audience would have been happy if that song had been reprised over and over again for another two hours. It was a showstopper. Other numbers were queued and ready to try to top it, though. And they did. Wolcott Gibbs, writing in The New Yorker, couldn’t get over “The Rain in Spain.” He called it “a moment that had everything charm, style, wit gaiety and I will cherish it as long as I live.” The reviewer from Time was among the many who fell in love with Julie Andrews during “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

At the end of the show, the audience didn’t just clap. They didn’t just stand up either, lumbering to their feet in what sometimes passes for a standing ovation. No, in a night like no other, they jumped up as one at the final curtain, hollering all the while. Even that wasn’t enough. They rushed into the aisles toward the stage, not wanting to leave My Fair Lady or ever let it get away. In the 50 years since the songs were first sung, it never has.

Julie M. Fenster is the author with Douglas Brinkley of Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism (Morrow, 2006).