(no subject)

[pedanther]

Casting has been announced, and rehearsals begun, for our production of My Fair Lady. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a fair amount of overlap with the cast of our production of Oliver! a couple of years ago. Fagin is now Henry Higgins, Nancy is Eliza Doolittle, Mr Bumble is Eliza's father, and Mr Brownlow is Colonel Pickering. We also have an understudy Eliza, who is new to the club but has been the lead in the local high school's last few musicals, and has done well several years running in the drama section of the annual performing arts festival.

I knew the basic plot, and I've owned the Original Broadway Cast album for years, so the songs are very familiar, but I've never actually seen the musical all the way through before, so the context of some of the songs has come as something of a surprise. ("I Could Have Danced All Night", for instance, shows up much earlier than I was expecting it.) Actually, some of the songs are not quite as familiar as all that: Rex Harrison didn't have much of singing voice and was allowed to get away with reciting his lyrics in time with the music, so it has come of something of a novelty to discover that Higgins's solo numbers have actual tunes.