My Fair Lady, With Gregory Jbara, Laura Michelle Kelly, Cloris Leachman, Jonathan Pryce, Max von Essen, Plays Kennedy Center May 5

By Andrew Gans
05 May 2013

Laura Michelle Kelly
Laura Michelle Kelly

For its 21st annual Spring Gala, The Kennedy Center presents My Fair Lady in Concert May 5 at 8 PM in the Concert Hall. Tony Award nominee Marcia Milgrom Dodge directs and choreographs the concert staging, which features the 35-piece Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra conducted by music director James Moore.

The famed 1956 musical has book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner with music by Frederick Loewe.

The cast boasts Tony winner Gregory Jbara as Alfred P. Doolittle, Olivier Award winner Laura Michelle Kelly as Eliza Doolittle, Academy Award and multiple Emmy Award winner Cloris Leachman as Mrs. Higgins, Florence Lacey as Mrs. Pearce, two-time Tony Award winner Jonathan Pryce as Henry Higgins, Max von Essen as Freddy Eynsford-Hill and Michael York as Colonel Pickering.

The black-tie evening begins at 5 PM with a reception on the River Terrace followed by dinner on the Roof Terrace at 6 PM. The Gala performance begins at 8 PM in the Concert Hall, and the evening concludes with ‘Til Midnight, a cocktails and dancing party, on the Roof Terrace.

My Fair Lady, adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and Gabriel Pascal’s motion picture, is about a "poor Cockney flower girl (Eliza Doolittle) who takes speech lessons from a snobbish phonetics professor (Henry Higgins) in order to pass for a lady in high society." The score includes “The Rain in Spain,” “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

For more information visit kennedy-center.org.