Saguaro City Music Theatre is dipping into musical theater’s golden age this weekend for the second show in its 2025-26 season.
The 3-year-old company is mounting Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 family-friendly musical “My Fair Lady,” the story of a working-class Cockney girl who turns to a pompous phonetics professor for lessons on how to be a lady.
This is “a story with some of the best music and timeless hits and it really deals with some subject matter still applicable today: judgment from how we speak and what language we use and the perceptions based on our speech,” said Director Drew Humphrey.
Lerner and Loewe adapted the musical from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion”; it appeared on Broadway in 1956 with Rex Harrison as the phonetician Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle, who turns to Higgins to help her improve her lot in life by ridding her of her low-class Cockney accent.
The play, which garnered six Tonys, including Best Musical, was made into a film starring Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in 1964. The film earned eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Humphrey, Saguaro City’s co-founder and artistic director, said “My Fair Lady” also deals with female empowerment as Eliza finds her own voice and “demand(s) her own value and worth regardless of how the world perceives her and how Higgins perceives her.” Higgins, meanwhile, just wants to prove he can transform Eliza into a proper lady who will be mistaken by high society as one of their own.
Eliza Doolittle (Lily Grubert) sells her flowers alongside the produce with the Cockney Quartet (from left, Kemar Williams, Luke S. Howell, Harrison Dodge and Preston Hatch) in a scene from Saguaro City Musical Theatre’s production of “My Fair Lady.” The show opens at the Berger Center for the Performing Arts this weekend.
Recent University of Arizona musical theater graduate Lily Grubert landed the role of Eliza, which she says is “a dream role for many including myself.”
“She’s such an important role in the musical theater canon,” said Grubert, who had lead roles in a number of UA productions through her college career and has been in three other Saguaro City productions, including “Shrek” in June. “Her arc is so important. She has so much that she goes through, not just a mental transformation but a physical one and a verbal one. I’m so excited to explore how she goes about that.”
From left, Col Pickering (Stewart Gregory) chats with Professor Higgins (Michael Padgett) in a scene from Saguaro City Musical Theatre’s production of “My Fair Lady.”
New York-based actor Michael Padgett, who plays Higgins, had auditioned for “My Fair Lady” several times over his 20-plus-year career in New York, but had never landed the part.
‘”My Fair Lady’ is a show I always loved,” he said during a conference call late last month with Gruber and Humphrey. “It was a play I always wanted to do.”
Eliza Doolittle (Lily Grubert) is surrounded by members of the Cockney Quartet — from left, Luke S. Howell, Preston Hatch and Harrison Dodge — in a scene from “My Fair Lady.”
Padgett sees in Higgins a man who fancies himself a gentleman, even though he is cranky and a misanthrope.
“Eliza sees him as a brute,” Padgett said. “He doesn’t have that social filter that ingratiates people.”
“It’s such a tremendous role,” he added. “It’s almost Shakespearean in breadth and character.”
The show has plenty of humor, including “The Rain in Spain,” where Higgins proclaims, “By George, she’s got it!” after Eliza finally enunciates the words correctly, and “Just You Wait,” where Eliza imagines her revenge on Higgins once she’s become famous.
But it is the iconic soundtrack — “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “On the Street Where You Live,” “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “Show Me” — that will resonate with audiences, said Humphrey. Even if you have never seen the movie or heard of the play, you have surely heard the songs, even in passing, because they are so ingrained in our popular culture.
Since it launched with the radio play adaptation of “It’s A Wonderful Life” in December 2022, Saguaro City has seen its audience grow from a handful of mostly younger people to near sold-out audiences that leaned older for its performances last October of the jukebox musical “Million Dollar Quartet.”
“A show like ‘My Fair Lady’ is really important for that reason,” said Saguaro City co-founder/managing director Dena DiGiacinto. “We are getting a lot of buzz among older people in town and hopefully that will invite more people from the community to see our productions.”
“My Fair Lady,” which features a live band including keyboards, percussion, trombone, flute and woodwinds, runs Saturday, Oct. 11-26 at Berger Performing Arts Center, 1200 W. Speedway. Showtimes are 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and 7 p.m. Fridays, with a 2 p.m. matinee on Friday, Oct. 24.
Tickets, $28.50-$69.50, are available through saguarocity.org/tickets. The show runs 2 hours, 35 minutes with one 15-minute intermission.
