My Fair Lady Comes to St. Mary’s

The SMA girls’ drama club, including thirty-one cast members and another thirty-seven back-stage assistants, delighted audiences in McCabe Theater in December with three performances of the musical My Fair Lady, an adaptation by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, of the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion. Recently hailed as “the most perfect musical of all time” (Entertainment Weekly), the beloved romance-comedy, features a pompous British phonetics professor and avowed bachelor, Henry Higgins, (played by Susanna Childs SMA ‘22) who makes a bet to transform a Cockney working-class girl, Eliza Doolittle, (played by Trinity Smalley SMA ’20) into someone who can pass for a cultured member of high society, by simply teaching her proper English pronunciation. Our young American actresses bravely accepted the challenge of transforming their own pronunciation, not only in speech but also in song, and under the superb guidance of SMA teacher Miss Therese McFarland (Director and Choreographer), Mrs. Krista Childs (Musical Director), and Fr. Paul-Isaac Franks (Producer), surprised everyone with “the most perfect musical” performed this year in McCabe Theater.