March 15, 1956, 70 years ago: The musical My Fair Lady premieres at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York. Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music) based it on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, itself based on a Greek myth about a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he had carved.
Rex Harrison plays Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor in 1912 London, who bets that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl one step ahead of homelessness, played by Julie Andrews; and, within six months, pass her off as a Duchess at a ball.
Eliza's Cockney accent makes this the greatest challenge of Higgins' career. He accepts her offer of 1 shilling, thinking it as being like 60 or 70 pounds from a millionaire. In 2026 money, that 1 shilling would be about £8.00, or about $11.20. In contrast, £60 would be about £9,000, or about $12,600.
Ultimately, Eliza applies herself out of spite, because Higgins is a misogynist and an elitist who pushes her so hard. Or, as the man himself puts it, "I find the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. And I find that the moment I make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical."
Spoiler alert: Higgins was already selfish and tyrannical, as seen in his first song, a bigoted piece that asks, "Why can't the English learn to speak?" In it, he insults the Cockneys of London's East End, Yorkshiremen, Cornishmen, the Scots and the Irish, remarking, "There even are places where English completely disappears: Well, in America, they haven't used it for years!"
Act I of the play is about Eliza's transformation. Act II is about her reaction to it, and Higgins' reaction to that. In the original play, Pygmalion, she chooses to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a well-to-do, well-meaning but not very bright young man who fell for her before the transformation was complete, an "I knew you when" situation.
In the musical, she goes back to Higgins, who will always see her as the flower girl that she was. The play was written for pre-World War I Britain by the egalitarian, socialist Shaw; the musical was written for post-World War II, male-dominant America.
The musical won 6 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and Best Actor for Harrison. It was filmed in 1964, by director George Cukor for Warner Brothers, and won 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, and Best Actor for Harrison.
Audrey Hepburn replaced Andrews as Eliza, because Cukor didn't want an actress who had never acted in a film before. Well, Hepburn became the latest actress to get her singing dubbed by Marni Nixon, and was beaten out for Best Actress by... Andrews, for her 1st film role, Mary Poppins, in which she spectacularly did her own singing.
The Mark Hellinger Theatre was at 237 West 51st Street. In 1989, the building was converted, or so to speak, into The Times Square Church, and is still in use as such today.
George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, Stanley Holloway (Eliza's father, Alfred, in both musical and film) in 1982, Robert Coote (who appeared in the musical as Colonel Hugh Pickering, the linguist who bets that Higgins can't do it, but nonetheless stands up for Eliza) also in 1982, George Cukor in 1983, Alan Jay Lerner in 1986, Frederick Loewe in 1988, Wilfrid Hyde-White (Pickering in the film) in 1991, Audrey Hepburn in 1993, Jeremy Brett (Freddy in the film) in 1995, and John Michael King (Freddy in the musical) in 2008. As of March 15, 2022, Julie Andrews is still alive.
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Also premiering on March 15, 1956 was the film Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred M. Wilcox. This is the first science fiction film in which humans are depicted traveling in a starship of their own creation, rather than aliens coming to Earth. It is also the first science fiction film set entirely on another world in interstellar space, far away from the planet Earth.
By calling that planet "Altair IV," meaning the 4th planet revolving around the star that Earth astronomers have named Altair, it established the sci-fi concept of doing that for planets, most often used in the Star Trek mythos.
The film marked the debut of Robby the Robot, who would become a science fiction icon, mainly because it was cheaper to put an unknown actor in an already-built robot suit than to design and operate a working robot, or even to make a new robot suit.
Forbidden Planet owes much to William Shakespeare's last great play, The Tempest, with Walter Pidgeon's Dr. Edward Morbius standing in for the wizard Prospero, Anne Francis' Altaira for Miranda, and Robby for Caliban.
It also owes much the writings of psychologist Carl Jung, then still alive. Jung had written of a "collective unconscious." In the film, Dr. Morbius swears he is not the villain, but he proves to be an unwilling one, as his unconscious mind was the main threat. Science fiction had already, in print, tried to challenge the ideas of good and evil, showing that what appears to be the hero might not be, and what appears to be the villain might not be.
