The Broadway

cast recording A cast recording is a recording of a stage musical that is intended to document the songs as they were performed in the show and experienced by the audience. An original cast recording or OCR, as the name implies, features the voices of the sho ...

of the musical ''

My Fair Lady ''My Fair Lady'' is a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play '' Pygmalion'', with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons ...

'' was released as an album by Columbia Records on the Masterworks label on April 2, 1956. The songs were composed by Frederick Loewe with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and conducted by

Franz Allers Franz Allers (August 6, 1905 - January 26, 1995) was a European-American conductor of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, film scores, and symphony orchestras. Early life Franz Allers was born in Carlsbad, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) in 1 ...

, while the cast included stars Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. The album became a massive seller, topping the charts on the US ''Billboard'' 200 for fifteen weeks at different times in

1956 Events January * January 1 – The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium ends in Sudan. * January 8 – Operation Auca: Five U.S. evangelical Christian missionaries, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming, ar ...

(eight consecutive weeks),

1957 1957 ( MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1957th year of the Common Era (CE) and ''Anno Domini'' (AD) designations, the 957th year of the 2nd millennium, the 57th year of the 20th century, and the 8th year ...

1958 Events January * January 1 – The European Economic Community (EEC) comes into being. * January 3 – The West Indies Federation is formed. * January 4 ** Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition completes the third ...

and

1959 Events January * January 1 - Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when the forces of Fidel Castro advance. * January 2 - Lunar probe Luna 1 was the first man-made object to attain escape velocity from Earth. It reached the vicinity of E ...

. It was the first LP record to sell 1 million copies. In the UK, upon its release in

, the album reached No.1 for 19 consecutive weeks and became the biggest-selling album of the year. Columbia's President,

Goddard Lieberson Goddard Lieberson (April 5, 1911 – May 29, 1977) was the president of Columbia Records from 1956 to 1971, and again from 1973 to 1975. He became president of the Recording Industry Association of America in 1964. He was also a composer, and ...

provided the $375,000 needed to stage the show in return for the rights to the Cast recording. Columbia first reissued the album on

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Oc ...

in 1988 and it has been reissued a number of times since. It is currently available with bonus tracks. The original cast recording had the (currently in 2018) 5th longest run ever for any album in the ''Billboard'' 200 charts with 480 weeks. The leads of the Broadway cast re-recorded their parts for the London cast recording, which was made in stereo in 1959.

Track listing

Chart positions

* returned to number 1 on ''Billboard'' 200 at different times during 1957, 1958 and 1959.

References

{{Authority control Cast recordings Columbia Records albums 1956 albums United States National Recording Registry recordings Various artists albums Albums recorded at CBS 30th Street Studio