If I admitted to my friends that I like musicals, they'd start to wonder if my wife was a 'beard.' It's not really true, though, I don't like most musicals. There have been the occasional songs that I have liked over the years that originated in musicals: "'Til There Was You" as sung by Macca, "Over The Rainbow" from the Wizard of Oz, and you have to admire "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going" with all its scenery-chewing vocal virtuosity.

I've often wondered, though, what it must have been like to sit in the audience on March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre attending the Broadway premiere of "My Fair Lady." Musicals were a pretty familiar form at the time, and although the notices from New Haven were probably pretty good, the audience may not have been adequately prepared for what they were about to see and hear.

Once in a while, a lyricist would turn a clever line or two in a comedic song for the stage, and if the producer was lucky, one of the songs would have a memorable, singable melody that left people humming it as they left the theatre. Alan Jay Lerner, taking his cue from G. B. Shaw, wrote the most hilariously venomous lyrics, song after song, and Frederick Loewe, using Gabriel Pascal's line, "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" as his launching point, wrote Spanish-inspired melodies that stayed hits for decades. How many hit songs came from that show? And of the 'album tracks' could it be said that any of them were filler? I don't think so; the least distinguished song in the show would be "Ascot Opening Day" which is devastatingly funny in skewering the pretensions of the upper class, and is also virtually the only ensemble song in the show. Everything (including that song) is gold, and I had a hard time picking the best example to accompany this article, but I had to come down in favour of "Why Can't The English Learn To Speak" as a first-rate depiction of the art of lyric writing. Enjoy: