‘My Fair Lady’ Gets Fresh Take At Atlanta Lyric Theatre

Be ready to dance all night, and bring an umbrella for the rain in Spain. The Atlanta Lyric Theatre is opening up their 2017 – 2018 season with the classic story, “My Fair Lady.”

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The show runs August 18 – September 3 at the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre in Marietta. 

In the classic story, which first hit Broadway in 1956 and starred Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, involves a professor (played here by Mark Miller) who takes a poor young flower seller (Galen Crawley) under his tutelage and tries to teach her to speak the Queen’s English and to be a lady.

Director Scott Seidl went back to the story’s origins as the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw for this production. 

“If you go back and look at the original material,” he tells City Lights host Lois Reitzes, “he was bringing to light how the upper class was treating the lower middle class in that time period, so that was our starting point.”

“We’re playing up the opposites of what people expect of [Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle],” Seidl explains. “Our Eliza is a little brattier, a little more aggressive than we’re used to, and Higgins is being honest and child-like. He’s never intentionally insulting anyone, he’s just saying what he thinks.”