This meant a copious amount of dialogue, but Lerner insisted on retaining as much Shaw as possible. ” The foundation for their work would be the superb screenplay written by Shaw himself for Pascal’s 1938 film. With the ever-present problem of an unromantic plot, the duo finally achieved a breakthrough in realizing that, as Lerner later explained, they “could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion. At first the task proposed by Pascal seemed too daunting (Rodgers and Hammerstein had previously made the attempt and given up) after all, how could anyone create a great contemporary musical without a love story? Lerner and Loewe abandoned the project, but after Pascal’s fruitless pursuit of Noël Coward and Cole Porter -two other musical-theater greats -they began again, starting work shortly after Pascal’s death in mid-1954.
The instigator, film producer-director Gabriel Pascal, had previously fashioned brilliant film adaptations of four Shaw plays - Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion. Lerner and Loewe were already successful on Broadway ( Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon ) by 1952, when the idea of a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was suggested to them.
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