Alan Jay Lerner's My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, is the bewitching story of a cockney girl's transformation into the pride of London Society and is one of the best loved musicals of all time. It opened in the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York on 15th March, 1956 and ran for 2,717 performances, winning 9 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Leading Actor, Author and Composer. The film version, produced in 1964, won 7 Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Director. The story is as follows:

Professor Henry Higgins, who is England's greatest phoneticist, comes across Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller, outside the Opera House at Covent Garden. Higgins is searching out new London dialects and meets Colonel Pickering, a fellow linguistics expert, whom he invites to stav with him. Higgins boasts to Pickering that he could train any woman to speak so properly that he could pass her off as a duchess. Eliza arrives at Higgins' flat offering to pay for lessons so that she may get a job as a lady in a flower shop. Pickering challenges Higgins that he could pass Eliza off as a duchess at the Embassy Ball. Higgins decides to take up the challenge. He however treats poor Eliza not as a person but as raw material for his experiment.

Eliza's father, Alfred P. Doolittle, a dustman, arrives asking for money in return for his daughter. Higgins is only too happy to oblige.

Eliza eventually learns to speak 'proper' and Higgins and Pickering decide to put her to the test by taking her to Ascot Races to see if she can blend in. Things start well but Eliza's enthusiasm for her horse lets her down. However, Freddy Eynsford-Hill falls hopelessly in love with the 'lady'.

Six weeks after the Ascot debacle, Higgins presents Eliza at a full-dress Embassy Ball, where she impresses everyone, including Karpathy, a European phonetics expert.

After the Ball, Higgins and Pickering arrive home congratulating themselves on their triumph, totally ignoring Eliza's accomplishment. She storms out of the house and whilst aimlessly wandering the streets she comes across her father. He has become wealthy thanks to a bequest from an American moralist, and because of this has been forced to marry Eliza's stepmother.

Meanwhile, Higgins realises that he is hurt because Eliza has left him. He meets her at his mother's house where she has gone for advice. Eliza leaves after another argument. It is only a moment after her departure that Higgins finally wakes up to the fact that Eliza has become an entirely independent and admirable human being.

Back at his flat he sinks into his chair prepared to face a bleak lonely future, but just then a figure emerges from a corner of the room, and Higgins, recognising Eliza, leans back with a smile and says softly "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?"