The musical My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, debuted at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York City.

My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and on the 1938 film adaptation of the play, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady. Despite his cynical nature and difficulty understanding women, Higgins grows attached to her.

George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pygmalion is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure. It premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913 and was first presented on stage in German. Its English-language premiere took place at His Majesty's Theatre in London's West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle.

The Mark Hellinger Theatre is a church and former theater at 237 West 51st Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Opened in 1930, the Hellinger Theatre is named after journalist Mark Hellinger and was developed by Warner Bros. as a movie palace before later hosting Broadway productions. It was designed by Thomas W. Lamb with a 1930s–modern style facade and a Baroque interior. It has 1,603 seats across two levels and has been a house of worship for the Times Square Church since 1989. Both the exterior and interior of the theater are New York City landmarks.