My Fair Lady I did". It is Eliza, standing in the doorway. In suppressed joy at their reunion, Professor Higgins scoffs and asks, "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" The original cast of the Broadway stage production: Act I Act II In the mid-1930s, film producer Gabriel Pascal acquired the rights to produce film versions of several of George Bernard Shaw's plays, "Pygmalion" among them. However, Shaw, having had a bad experience with "The Chocolate Soldier", a Viennese operetta based on his play "Arms and the Man", refused permission for "Pygmalion" to be adapted into a musical. After Shaw died in 1950,
My Fair Lady settled on the title "My Fair Lady", relating both to one of Shaw's provisional titles for "Pygmalion", "Fair Eliza", and to the final line of every verse of the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down". Recalling that the Gershwins' 1925 musical "Tell Me More" had been titled "My Fair Lady" in its out-of-town tryout, and also had a musical number under that title, Lerner made a courtesy call to Ira Gershwin, alerting him to the use of the title for the Lerner and Loewe musical. Noël Coward was the first to be offered the role of Henry Higgins, but