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After yesterday's post about Pygmalion, a reader asked if I prefer it to My Fair Lady. I guess I do.

Shaw, of course, hated musicalizations of his work and forbade them while he was alive. He said his words were music enough.

Pygmalion, his first real "West End" hit, was more a crowd-pleaser than most of his material, and so a natural for adaptation after Shaw kicked off. Even then a lot of professionals thought it couldn't be done until Lerner and Loewe figured out how: stick to Shaw as closely as possible, but not just the original play--use the film, which Shaw had a hand in and which which added some of the most famous scenes, such as the embassy ball and the elocution lessons, not to mention the suggestion of romance at the end.

My Fair Lady is unusual for a musical in that it's built so strongly on its book. While I like (but don't love) the songs, I don't consider them improvements over the original dialogue. (There was a musical, Baker Street, based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Think about this. Does Holmes really need all those people dancing on the streets around him? That's sort of how I feel about Pygmalion.)

Not that Pygmalion doesn't have flaws. It's in five acts and almost all the best stuff is over after Act Three. But when it's working, Shaw was right, it doesn't need music.

And I'll certainly take the 1938 Leslie Howard Pygmalion over the vastly overrated, overlong 1964 Rex Harrison My Fair Lady.