Before taking the stage as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway in 1956, Julie Andrews warmed up her voice before heading to the theatre. In her apartment, her gray-and-white poodle, Shy, used to howl along with her.
At the time, she wasn’t vocalizing to a certain beloved version of “do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do,” since The Sound of Music wouldn’t come out until 1965. But she had a very specific routine of exercising up and down the scales.
“Certain different vowels,” Andrews, 90, tells Broadway Direct over Zoom. “Different scales … whatever I felt would pull the voice forward and get it warm for the show that evening. You wake up a little bit groggy and gravelly, and you have to kind of bring your voice up to a certain level of performance,” she says, demonstrating. It would take about a half hour during the late morning into early afternoon.
My Fair Lady, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, now leased by the Times Square Church. When she arrived at the theatre at 6:30 p.m. for an 8:30 p.m. curtain, she continued her warmups so she was ready for the show, “which was mammoth, in that sense. It was huge vocally, so I had to be really on, you know, in tune,” she explains.
Matinee days were “tough,” Andrews recalls, because she would arrive at the theatre around 11:30 a.m. and “that was the end of the day,” she felt. She used to think of Wednesdays as “Black Wednesday” because she never saw daylight. Once she entered the theatre for a matinee, she stayed there so she could relax and rest before the evening performance.
I’ve Always Been Shy
Memories of the great Dame’s vocal warmups during her long run in My Fair Lady are what inspired Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton to pen their latest children’s book. Shy, which came out August 11, is based on Andrews’s real-life “singing” dog. When they were brainstorming ideas, they wanted to come up with a story relating to their shared passion for the arts.
In the picture book, Shy is a timid shelter pup who finds comfort in a piano player who is also shy and in need of a companion. “There’s a page where [the piano player] brings [Shy] home — you can see in his living room pictures of himself with other dogs on the wall,” explains Hamilton. “You sort of get the message subliminally through the art [by Eva Byrne] that there have perhaps been other companions that have moved on, and he’s looking for a new friend.”
“Even the smallest creature or person can find what they love to do, and it’s just a little fable about that,” adds Andrews.
The true story is that Andrews got Shy because she “needed that little rock to divert me a little bit.” Whenever Andrews practiced her singing in her apartment in the Lenox Hill neighborhood — at 1175 York Avenue and East 63rd Street — “[Shy] would put her little neck up as straight as she could and then howl away.” Andrews says it got to the point where she was worried about neighbors complaining.
“I would put her behind the door in the corridor. I’d see her little snout come under the door, and she’d still be trying to sing along with me. It was very, very sweet.”
I’ve Grown Accustomed to Broadway
Before her breakout role in My Fair Lady, Andrews made her Broadway debut in The Boyfriend in 1954. It marked the English legend’s first time in America. “I was so green, but it was very successful.” Andrews presumes Lerner and Loewe heard of her good reviews, came to see her ingénue performance, and then asked her to audition for Eliza. She sang and did some readings, which Andrews felt were “amateurish readings on my part. I wasn’t then an actress as such,” she admits. “My real stock-in-trade was singing and my good voice.”
At the same time, she remembers, composer Richard Rodgers saw The Boyfriend, and something he said has stuck with her to this day.
He came up on stage after the show, and she recalls him saying, “That was absolutely adequate.” “I went, ‘Oh, really?’ He said, ‘No, I’m teasing you. It was lovely. Are you auditioning for anything else?’” Andrews told Rodgers she was auditioning for two gentlemen doing an adaptation of Pygmalion. “He said, ‘If they offer you that show, I think you should take it. If they don’t, I’d like you to come and see us again because we’d love to use you.’ And that was one of the loveliest, kindest pieces of advice.”
For Andrews, My Fair Lady was “one of the biggest and toughest Broadway shows.” She notes that a show like West Side Story has its own huge things going on, including dance. “But in my case, it was all vocal, because it was Cockney voice to start with and singing in Cockney.”
One of the most famous songs in the musical, “I Could Have Danced All Night,” wasn’t originally in the show, according to Andrews.
“I had a different song, which appeared in Gigi, called ‘Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,’ which at that time was Eliza going to the ball,” she reveals. “[Lerner and Loewe] realized that there wasn’t any kind of love interest in My Fair Lady — it was all [professor Henry] Higgins holding back and Eliza being angry at him. And, of course, they were bonding. So they decided to write me another song. What’s lovely about ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ is that it is a love song, but it never mentions being in love. It lets out her feelings very cleverly placed in the show, and you just know that she’s gone and fallen for him in a way.”
It wasn’t until Andrews was settled into the run of the production when she began working with Rodgers and Hammerstein.
“I was due a holiday anyway, but it wasn’t a holiday. It was learning Cinderella,” she says of the famed 1957 filmed production.
A Spoonful of Hollywood
Andrews continued her prolific career on Broadway in Camelot, from 1960 to 1962, followed by her Hollywood debut in 1964’s Mary Poppins and, subsequently, The Sound of Music in 1965. When My Fair Lady was being turned into a movie in 1964, the role of Eliza Doolittle famously went to Audrey Hepburn. Director Jack Warner wanted a bankable Hollywood name for the starring role, and at the time, Andrews was only known in Broadway circles. So she instead landed the role as the famed nanny — and the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best actress that year went to Andrews for her star turn as Mary Poppins. In her acceptance speech at the Oscars, Andrews cheekily thanked Warner, “who made a wonderful movie and made all this possible in the first place.”
The Sound of Jasmine Amy Rogers
These days, she doesn’t travel into New York City much due to her arthritis, but she shared her excitement over the news of Tony Award nominee Jasmine Amy Rogers taking on Andrews’s legendary role of Maria in The Sound of Music at Lincoln Center next spring.
“She’s got a gorgeous voice, and I hear that she’s wonderful,” Andrews praises of the rising star.
Coincidentally, Rogers has a dog as well (a boxer named Martha May Whovier), who might feel compelled to sing along like Shy.
