After a few decades, Eliza Doolittle is back on Broadway, journeying from dropped consonants to the British upper crust in the Lincoln Center Theater’s new revival of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. In the new production, Lauren Ambrose, a relative unknown on Broadway despite her time on Six Feet Under on TV, steps into the extremely well-known role of Eliza. Bartlett Sher’s sumptuous staging of the show earned ten Tony nominations, and according to New York’s Sara Holdren, proved that a “beloved musical from another era can keep on kicking.†Now, you can listen to a first stream of the revival’s cast recording here on Vulture before it becomes available this Friday, June 8.
Alongside Ambrose, the cast of My Fair Lady includes Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, Norbert Leo Butz as Alfred P. Doolittle, Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering, Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Linda Mugleston as Mrs. Pearce, and Manu Narayan as Zoltan Karpathy. Ted Sperling, the production’s musical director, conducts a 29-piece orchestra (which appears onstage during the show) performing the show’s original musical arrangements by Robert Russell Bennett and Phil Lang, and dance arrangements by Trude Rittmann. All in all, it’s pretty loverly.