“I could have danced all night” from My Fair Lady (1956)

First performed nearly ten years later than Kiss me Kate, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, ran even longer in its original production in New York. It remains a universal favourite. From a musical point of view the most interesting items are not Henry Higgins’s half-spoken numbers like “Why can’t the English?” and “I’ve grown accustomed to her face” but Eliza Doolittle ‘s tuneful songs like “Wouldn’t it be loverly”and “I could have danced all night.” “Wouldn’t it be loverly” represents Eliza the cockney flower-girl before Higgins’s coachng sessions. “I could have danced all night” signals, with its classy floating line, her transformation to a, by all appearances, society lady.