CHICAGO—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein turned down the opportunity to adapt George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 “Pygmalion” play into a musical comedy. It was too wordy, they said, and not romantic. It would never work as a musical.
Indeed, Shaw’s drawing-room comedy of class differences in which Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle to use proper English didn’t look to be a promising idea for a musical. Shaw seemed more interested in exploring how social classes are differentiated through the use of language rather than the mechanics of love.
