My Fair Lady

As a musical, music and dancing are important elements of the storytelling. However, the music itself becomes an important motif, giving insight into the development of the characters, particularly Eliza and Henry Higgins. Dancing is also significant for the narrative instead of serving as simple spectacle.

Eliza’s journey can be tracked through music and the complexity of her songs. When she sings “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?,” Eliza is a flower girl who lives a simple life and only wishes for an existence that’s a little better and more comfortable. The song has a simple melody and is undemanding for the singer. The choreography is literal and involves miming what Eliza is singing about. Later, after a few days of Higgins’s callous demands on her, she sings “Just You Wait,” which is harsh and requires the actor to shout-sing. Then, Eliza’s musical tone shifts with “I Could Have Danced All Night,” which is lyrical and musically complex, requiring a more trained voice to sing.

Higgins sings most of his songs as patter, or sing-speaking. If singing is a form of indulging one’s emotions, this makes sense for Higgins, who keeps all his feelings buttoned up. Patter is also usually wordy and clever, and Higgins uses a lot of his musical moments to complain wittily about things he hates, such as accents and women. He lets himself loose during “The Rain in Spain” out of exhaustion and happiness and does the same with “You Did It,” but goes back to patter for the defensive “A Hymn to Him.” His one contemplative and melodic musical moment is “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” in which he struggles to understand his own feelings for Eliza, only able to settle on the idea that he got used to seeing her. Notably, Alfred Doolittle sings two songs in the same style, showing how he deliberately resists change or growth.

Dance is significant at the Embassy Ball, as Eliza takes part in a choreographed waltz that involves partner-switching. At first, Eliza and Higgins dance together, showing their cohesiveness as a partnership, friendly or otherwise. Then, she switches and dances with Zoltan Karpathy, an intricate moment of dance that requires her to both waltz and socialize while tricking Karpathy, which she apparently manages to do well. In these ways, the music and dance undertaken by the characters deepen their characterization and reflect their situation within the musical.