New Musical in Manhattan

My Fair Lady (adapted from Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion; book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe) is, to be curt about it, a delight. Retaining all of Pygmalion's surface merits, all of Shaw's hardy perennial bloom, a variety of craftsmen have added--with only trifling lapses and a slight disregard for length--a brightness, an ebullience, a festive mockery of their own. In this British comedy of accents, no discordant American one intrudes; in this new rendering of a flower girl's transformation, things--where need be--have not just been shifted, but transformed. To adapt a critical remark of G.B.S.'s own, those concerned have set Shaw to music and not merely set music to Shaw.

What is remarkable is only how fine a musical Pygmalion has become, and not that it should have become one. One play after another of Shaw's--who insisted that not dramatists but great composers really taught him his trade--has the soul of opera or opera bouffe. With his endless high spirits and royal-purple showmanship, Shaw has an operatic exuberance, as he often has a Gilbert-and-Sullivanish absurdity. He freely milks those staples of opera--the heroic, the romantic, the melodramatic--in the process of mocking them. His dazzling speeches are pure arias; he abounds in satiric roulades, is a master of verbal coloratura. Before My Fair Lady, The Chocolate Soldier was the only musical that grew out of Shaw. But plenty of Shaw plays--Androcles and the Lion, The Devil's Disciple, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra--might lend themselves to music with no greater romantic concessions than occur in My Fair Lady--where, at the end, it is Galatea who brings Pygmalion to life.

Those most concerned with My Fair Lady have triumphed, like dancers, in pairs. On the acting side, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews play Higgins and Eliza to perfection. In the one place where he is handicapped, Actor Harrison proves himself a true master of phonetics, for his singing is a victory of phonetics over voice. Otherwise, he catches every wrinkle of a monstrously assured, elegantly boorish scientist who is out to win a bet with no thought of wooing a woman, and who airs to Colonel Pickering his complaints about the other sex:

Would you be slighted if I didn't speak

for hours? If I forgot your silly birthday would

you fuss? Would you be wounded if I never sent

you flowers? Why can't a woman be like us?

With her enchanting voice and looks, Julie Andrews takes the grime-to-glamour phase of Eliza in her stride, sweeping on to become the sensation of a great embassy ball. But after the ball is over, and the fairy tale shivers into a sexual feud, she plays with such added charm and force as to make the much trickier second act hardly inferior to the effulgent first.

On the creative side. Librettist Lerner and Composer Loewe provide something almost as good; short of pure Rossini-like opera, nothing could be more in tune with Shaw. Lerner has made wise and liberal use of Shaw's dialogue and has contributed wittily mocking lyrics and brightly abusive spatter songs, whether about languid aristocrats at Ascot, or "Why can't the English learn to speak?":

Rumanians learn Rumanian although

why remains a riddle; Hungarians learn Hungarian once

they've learned to play the fiddle . . . Arabians learn Arabian with the speed

of summer lightning; The Hebrews learnt it backwards,

which is absolutely frightening.

If Loewe's score is a pastiche of set melodic and lyrical styles, it is yet pleasantly melodious and lyrical.

Two additional pairs have made everything shipshape. Hanya Holm has contrived gay, foaming, whirling dances, and Moss Hart has staged the production with an urbane mastery of style and pace. Oliver Smith's charming and amusing sets go hand in hand with Cecil Beaton's witty and lovely costumes. And visually, the fact that the show is laid in 1912 makes both for extra comic touches and for a particular nostalgic charm.

Julie Andrews, 20, of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, has light brown hair, grey-blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion. Her singing lessons began at eight, soon after her mother discovered, in a wartime air raid shelter, that Julie had a voice. In the midst of group singing conducted by her father to keep up morale, Julie's voice soared above all the others. "At the time," Julie recalls, "school was closed, and I was getting under everybody's feet. Father said, 'Oh, for goodness' sake, let's give her something to do to keep her busy and out of the way.' " Julie got singing lessons and proved to have perfect pitch.

At twelve, able to hit F above high C, she made her stage debut. Wearing a pale blue party dress and braids, she appeared in a revue at the London Hippodrome, and in a sweet soprano sang the Polonaise from Mignon. It stopped the show, drew ecstatic reviews and launched her career.

By the time she had survived the gangly age, Julie had developed into that rare theatrical paradox, an ethereal type with beautifully earthy proportions (34-23-36).

At 18, Julie was playing Cinderella at the Palladium in one of the lavish musical versions of fairy tales the British call pantomimes. She was seen by Vida Hope, director of the British production of The Boy Friend, who hired her for the lead in the Broadway production of that musical spoof of the '20s. The day after the opening Julie celebrated her 19th birthday with rave reviews from all the New York critics. Soon after, she was rewarded with star billing.

Julie tackled the role of Shaw's Eliza Doolittle with modest misgivings. Studying Wendy Killer's interpretation of the part, she saw the movie Pygmalion five times, learned to speak with elegance and precision ("It is my belief they done the old woman in"). But to polish up a cockney accent, she took speech lessons in Manhattan with Alfred Dixon, a former actor.

Julie knew she had at least one advantage over Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote Pygmalion: Mrs. Campbell was 49 when she first played 18-year-old Eliza. After opening night last week it was plain that Julie was more than just the right age for the role.

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