My Fair Lady

So Frank Lesser was writing with one eye on the charts, right? He wanted to write hits and he could write hits because it was a natural thing for songs to leap from the stage onto popular, into pop music more broadly.

My Fair Lady was the best selling album of its time.

the cast recording of that and that's no longer true well

there's an interesting thing there's a different way it's happening and also of course social media and internet has changed everything obviously but there's a musical called Six which I saw the original in Chicago and I thought it was quite brilliant it's more of a concert than say a full out musical But the album, you know, the songs were released and they were massive hits.

Since we're both such fans, as we've been talking about guys and dolls, this is a good question to turn to.

Which other musicals come close to Guys and Dolls for excellence, evergreen potential?

If it's done right, My Fair Lady.

Mm-hmm.

Reflective, ceremonial and free to wander into during the day.

My Fair Lady is at the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Opera House.

Aaron Chen brings technology to the State Theatre one more time.

For live music, Boy and Bear are at the Barracks Precinct tonight for a big outdoor Aussie gig.

A pedestrian hazard on the Great Western Highway at Prospect with a westbound lane closed and car breakdowns at Holroyd on the M4 off ramp and Erskine Park on Mamre Road.

Trains and Metro running normally for a third time this week, which is officially a phenomenon.

And tonight, the City is offering an NRL Elimination Final at Allianz, with the Rabideaus vs Knights, the Sydney Saki Festival opening at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, the First Nations Celebration Concert at the Con, My Fair Lady at the Opera House, Aaron Chen at the State, Boy and Bear at the Barracks.

violent Soho at the Enmore, swerve driver at Manning Bar, a working harbour cruise for History Week, and a full late-night club spread from Civic Underground to WAO to Chinese Laundry to Club 77.

Talk us through the, uh, the adventure after Back to the Future.

Well, that was, um, really weird because we got notice on Back to the Future, and My Fair Lady was auditioning at that time, so [laughs] literally went, "We're extending that." So all the Back to the Future people went and auditioned for My Fair Lady the next day.

And I walked into the audition, and everyone had sad face on.

And you're going, "Oh, this is really awful." And of course, and I had to go and find my music 'cause I didn't think I was auditioning.

Well, thanks.

See you later," and went back to perform at Back to the Future.

And then they were very kind, and I got offered, um, My Fair Lady, and at that time, we'd heard underground that Fiddler was coming.

Um, and then I started doing, um, videos for Jordan.

[laughs]

... and I was a little horrified [laughs] in My Fair Lady, you know, where the guy's like, "I can fix this girl," you know? I'm like, "What?"

I know.

The whole, the entire premise of it, I was like, "That's not right."

The back catalogue of what makes London's West End great from Mr. Andrew Lloyd Webber to Stephen Sondheim to Lionel Bart.

Indeed, to my fair lady, the great my fair lady, which is coming to Melbourne as his fiddler on the roof later in the year.

And we did a whole thing to Les Miserables.

Didn't quite get my story about the fact that when I actually first moved across to London, Hal Shaper, quite a significant lyricist, wrote for Michel Legrand, South African, a young man that he was, passed away many years ago.

And indeed, that is what played out.

That is apparently not apocryphal, but indeed a true story.

But we covered all that ground, Les Miserables and Andrew Lloyd Webber and My Fair Lady Stephen Sondheim and...

the fabulous Fembelling, did Leda Bernstein's West Side Story.

yeah i've had the feeling myself actually have you i mean i've certainly never done kind of male you know lead or any of these types of things or romantic leadership yeah yeah um or even like dance calls and things like i'm always i'm hanging out for my later character actor years sure

yeah yeah yeah Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, I could sing Freddie Ironsford Hill in My Fair Lady, but I was never going to be cast as it, you know.

So you knew, I knew that I had to kind of wait.

Yeah, and just do whatever you could to keep going and be involved, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.