There are two ways of reading Dominic McHugh’s Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. Either as a musicologist or, at least, reader of music, you may follow every step in the five-year evolution of the great musical My Fair Lady, down to the minutest changes in the tunes, lyrics, orchestral music, and story—their number is astronomical. Or, if you cannot read music, you can still follow the many steps involved in the five years spent adapting Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into a stage musical. These include acquisition of rights, problems with casting, major and minor rewrites of the words and music, stressful rehearsals, and arrival at a final Broadway version that, starting in 1956, ran for six years. All this plus an extensive aftermath.

Unless you snobbishly and stubbornly dismiss the musical comedy as a form of art, you must recognize Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady as a masterpiece. To be sure, one should not overlook certain contributors. There is first the Greek myth, best known in Ovid’s version, of how the sculptor Pygmalion fashioned his dream woman in ivory, and then prayed Aphrodite to give her life. The goddess obliged, and Pygmalion married the woman who later came to be known as Galatea.

The next major contributor is Shaw, whose Pygmalion, one of his finest plays, underlies the musical. In accordance with Shaw’s antiromantic temperament, this is not a love story. It is, rather, about the relations between