Plot & Song Synopsis MY FAIR LADY

MY FAIR LADY (1956) -- Plot Synopsis  (Musical numbers in Bold Italics)
(Overture).  The play opens on  rainy night outside the Covent Garden Opera House.  Across the street under the columns of St Paul's Church, Prof. Henry Higgins, a phonetics expert, is taking down notes of people's speech as they emerge from the opera.  He meets Colonel Hugh Pickering who is also a linguistics expert on leave from his post in India.  Admitting their mutual admiration, Higgins invites Pickering to stay at his home.  But before they can leave Higgins is irritated by the cockney accent of the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and the variety of other almost unintelligible English speakers on the scene (Why Can't the English).  He gets into an argument with Eliza who thinks he is spying on her.  However, she is intrigued when Higgins off-handedly tells Pickering that he could pass Eliza off as a lady by merely changing her speech.  After Higgins and Pickering leave, Eliza  laments her sad state with the overnight garden workers and longs for a situation where she can enjoy simple body comforts (Wouldn't It be Loverly).  Her father, Alfred P. Doolittle, "a common dustman", arrives on the scene broke after a night of bar-hopping with his deadbeat cronies and asks Eliza for some pocket money from her earnings that evening.  He expresses his personal philosophy of getting by in life without putting up much personal effort (With a Little Bit of Luck).   The next day, Eliza unexpectedly arrives at Higgins' house demanding that he take her money and teach her to speak properly so that she can one day better herself by opening a flower shop.  At first he threatens to throw her out, but he relents when he decides to make a bet with Pickering that he can teach her to speak so well that she will be accepted at a court ball.  She will have to stay for some time at his house and avoid going home while this transformation is perfected.  When Doolittle gets word of this situation, he arrives with the expectation that Higgins will give him some money for raising a daughter who has now "gained the attention" of men like Higgins and Pickering.  The Colonel is outraged but Higgins is amused by Doolittle and sends him on his way with a bit of money.  Both Higgins (I'm an Ordinary Man) and Eliza (Just You Wait) become frustrated with each other as Higgins dogged and high-handed attempts to improve her speech seem to be failing.  But late one night as Higgins and Pickering are laying about exhausted from the training, Eliza slowly gets it right.  The three of them partake in a joyous dance of celebration (The Rain in Spain).  Afterward, Eliza tells the head housekeeper, Mrs. Pierce, how much she enjoyed the experience (I Could Have Danced All Night).  Higgins decides that the first public test of Eliza's new proper speech will be at the annual opening of the posh Ascot Race Track (Ascot Gavotte).   The day is not a complete success as Eliza occasionally slips back into her cockney speech at inopportune times, but she does attract the adoring attention of the well-mannered and eligible, if less-than-bright, upperclass young bachelor Freddie Eynsford-Hill.  He is soon delivering flowers by hand to her door and waiting outside hoping to catch a glimpse of her ().  Higgins decides that the big test for Eliza is to be the annual Embassy Ball  (Embassy Waltz). The night proves to be a great success, and back at the house  Higgins and Pickering celebrate by recounting the events of the evening (You Did It) and congratulating themselves while ignoring Eliza who can hardly contain her anger at their selfish abandonment.  When she and Higgins are left alone and he asks her where his slippers are, she angrily throws them at him.  She leaves the house and runs into Freddy who tries to express his love in high-flown words but she interrupts, suspecting that he, like Higgins, is all talk (Show Me).  She asks Freddy to take her back to her old neighborhood of Covent Garden.  At first she is hardly recognized with her corrected English and nice clothes when she arrives there.  Doolittle appears on the scene near the end of a night of drinking and carousing for the last time.  He has been "shoved into the middle class" he says because Higgins has written to a wealthy American philanthropist who has awarded Doolittle a large sum of money as "the most original thinker in England."  Doolittle says he hasn't the nerve to refuse the money and will marry Eliza's stepmother in the morning because she is demanding respectability, too (Get Me to the Church on Time).  Higgins awakens to find Eliza gone and he and Pickering start a frantic search to see where she might be.  Higgins berates her in absentia as being an emotional and irrational woman (A Hymn to Him).  Higgins finally finds Eliza at his mother's house where she has gone to receive a little understanding and sympathy.  Eliza refuses Higgins offer of a truce if she will "just stop behaving like a fool."  She proclaims that life will go on quite nicely without him whether he realizes it or not (Without You).  As he slowly walks home alone after refusing to admit he was wrong, Higgins begins to realize how much he has lost (I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face).  When he returns home he turns on his voice recorders and hears his early disparaging remarks about Eliza and obviously senses how inconsiderate, cruel, and stupid he was.  Then he realizes that Eliza is standing at the door.  He sits down in his easy chair and shouts for his slippers.  Eliza stands with a bemused smile on her face as the final curtain falls.