My Fair Lady: The Musical

By Yuno Kasahara

My Fair Lady is a musical stage play and is based on the 1913 play Pygmalian written by George Bernard Shaw. It opened on Broadway in 1965, and was later made into a film in 1964.

The Musical My Fair Lady played at Sapporo Cultural Arts Theater Hitaru on Dec.17 and 18. This nationwide tour included Tokyo, Saitama, Iwate, Hokkaido, Yamagata, Shizuoka, Aichi, Osaka and Fukuoka for a total of 48 performances.

My Fair Lady is well known for the movie starring Audrey Hepburn. In 1910s London, flower girl Eliza Doolittle has lessons from a linguist Henry Higgins, and she changes into a beautiful lady and seems like a new person.

The main cast of the musical starred Manato Asaka, Tetsuya Bessyo and Takuto Teranishi. The actress who played the role of Eliza Doolittle is Manato Asaka. She’s from Saga. She joined the Takarazuka revue in 2002 and became a top star of Cosmos Troupe in 2015. In 2017 left Cosmos, and she is doing well in the musical world now. She is a good singer, and her co-star Bessyo praises her song highly. You can listen to her singing I Could Have Danced All Night on YouTube.

The actor who played the role of Professor Henry Higgins is Tetsuya Bessyo. He’s from Shizuoka. In 1990, he made his Hollywood debut in the film Solar Crisis. After that he has continued to perform in movies, television, stage and radio. He sometimes ad-libs while acting and gets a lot of laughs.

The actor who played the role of Freddie Eynsford-Hill is Takuto Teranishi. He’s from Kanagawa. He joined Johnny & Associates in 2008. He had been acting as a Johnny’s jr for 13 years, and he became an actor in 2021. He is a good singer and a dancer. You can listen to his singing On The Street Where You Live on Twitter.

Since this musical was performed for the first time in Japan in 1963, it has been staged many times since then. However, the actors and actresses are different each time. They might begin a new production a couple of years from now.