![]() ![]() The bigger challenge was tracking down what remained of the original creative team and cast. “Hours were spent trawling over drawings, costumes and set designs in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Arts Centre Melbourne Performing Arts Collection to name just a few,” the producers said. Tony award-winning Christopher Gattelli has already been announced as choreographer for the Sydney production, with Guy Simpson as musical director.īut the real stars of the show are likely to be the costumes and sets, recreated for the Opera House stage from Cecil Beaton and Oliver Smith’s original designs. The stage version of the musical has been revived every decade, with Cameron Mackintosh’s 2001 production at the National Theatre in London, directed by Trevor Nunn with choreography by Matthew Bourne – a particular hit. She transcended herself,” she added of the character.Ĭelebrated for her Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated screen turns in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Andrews was overlooked for the part of Eliza in the 1964 film of My Fair Lady in favour of Audrey Hepburn, whose singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon for much of the film. “She was desperately poor but she was bright and had ambition and guts. “She is for any actress one of the most daunting roles,” said Andrews, adding that in voice alone, Eliza has to go from cockney screaming rage to pure soprano singing. ![]() My Fair Lady was “the first event musical” said co-producer John Frost, adding that it “turned musicals upside down and inside out”.Īndrews had been auditioning local performers in Sydney for the past week and said the process of picking her Eliza could not be rushed. This 60th anniversary production was first announced in August as part of Opera Australia’s programming to mark its own 60th birthday, “a fantastic synergy” that chief executive Lyndon Terracini said was “irresistible”. Andrews hoped to do the same for her Australian cast. ![]() “I knew and felt that I understood Eliza but I needed to be guided.”īy the time the curtain came up at the Mark Hellinger theatre on opening night, director Moss Hart had made her into a “prize fighter”, she said. “I was very young and green and inexperienced at the time,” said Andrews of what was only her second Broadway role after The Boyfriend. “I eventually played Eliza for just about three-and-a-half years, eight performances a week – including two years in Broadway, 11 months in London – so I think I got to know it rather well.”Īlan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion stormed New York in 1956, where a young Andrews played its charming cockney heroine Eliza Doolittle – a Covent Garden flower girl made good. “My memories are huge,” said Andrews of the original production. ![]()
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