There are several complete performances of the musical My Fair Lady available on YouTube.
I’ve sampled the ones that I could find (YouTube’s search function is awful so I can’t promise that I found them all), and I picked three that I think might be worth your attention, assuming you enjoy the musical art form that was developed here in the States. I’ve downloaded two of them and added them to my Plex library as I think they are worth watching more than once. The third one is more of a curiosity.
(I thought about devoting a separate post to each of these but decided it was better to put them all together for comparison and contrast.)
First up is the 1995 production from the American Musical Theatre of San Jose, a professional theater organization that is sadly no longer around. But this performance is quite good.
Here’s part of the scene where Professor Higgins is trying to rid Eliza Doolittle of her cockney accent.
The full production can be found on YouTube here.
Next is the 2018 Lincoln Center Production. There’s a bootleg video of it on YouTube, and as it’s been there for a few years, I assume it’s not going anywhere. I’m not a big fan of bootlegs, because the quality of most of them is so poor. This one is at least watchable, as I could understand most of the dialog. Given my hearing problems, I assume most other people will find little problem with it either.
This was a greatly admired and lush production, though it had a controversial ending. I’m assuming that everyone reading this is familiar with the show, and therefore knows how it ends.
If not:
SPOILER ALERT!!
In the original play, Pygmalion, Shaw intentionally left the ending ambiguous. Eliza walked out of Henry Higgins’s life and he professed no intention of following her. Shaw even wrote a prose epilogue a few years later in which he described how Eliza and Freddy ended up marrying.
When the motion picture was made in 1939 and Shaw was hired to write the screenplay, the studio insisted that he unite Eliza and Higgins in some way, so he added the final slippers scene. This is the scene that Lerner and Loewe used for their musical adaptation.
As a reminder, Higgins has just sung his soliloquy “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” and is sitting on his couch, listening to a recording of Eliza’s voice that he made when she first entered his home. Eliza enters the room, and when he spies her, he echoes a line that he uttered earlier in the show, “Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?” Eliza smiles as the music swells and the curtain falls.
In the 2018 production, instead of smiling, Eliza makes a mad dash up the aisle through the audience.
Many folks found that ending somewhat jarring, so the director Bartlett Sher tinkered with it and softened it a bit. It’s the softened ending that is used in the video on YouTube.
In any case here is an excerpt from that video, part of the Ascot races scene. The role of Mrs. Higgins, Henry’s mother, is played by Diana Rigg. Eliza is played by Lauren Ambrose, and Harry Hadden-Paton plays Professor Henry Higgins.
The full video can be found here.
Finally, I enjoy seeing, or at least hearing, musicals done in languages other than English, but one might think that My Fair Lady, being so grounded in English language dialects might be immune to foreign language translation. If one thought that, one would be wrong.
I found a very interesting performance of the show from 1994 from Hungary, somewhat ironic if you know the show, as I’m assuming you do. Sadly there are no subtitles. I’d be very interested in a literal translation of the translation.
For comparison and contrast, here is part of the scene where Professor Higgins is teaching Eliza.
The full Hungarian video is here.