'Lost' songs from My Fair Lady to be performed for the first time

The musical scores, which were cut after the show's first night, were discovered in the Library of Congress after 50 years

Isobel Elsom (left) and Audrey Hepburn in a scene from the film 'My Fair Lady', 1964 (Getty)

Rediscovered songs from My Fair Lady are to be performed for the first time after being uncovered by a lecturer at the University of Sheffield.

The musical’s composers Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe cut two songs “Come to the Ball” and “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight”, as well as a ballet, after the show’s first night in 1956.

My Fair Lady was first performed on stage in New Haven, Connecticut starring Julie Andrews as cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins as her speech therapist Rex Harrison, but was deemed too long.

Seven original songs were dropped in total before the show transferred to Broadway.

“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” was later reworked and included in Lerner and Loewe’s 1958 musical film Gigi.

Rex Harrison congratulates his co-star Julie Andrews in her dressing room after a performance of My Fair Lady (Getty Images)

The songs’ manuscripts were discovered lying in boxes at the US Library of Congress in 2008 by Dr Dominic McHugh, a lecturer in Musicology at the University of Sheffield.

McHugh told the BBC it was “extremely thrilling” to find the manuscripts, adding it was “the most important discovery I’ve ever made”, but others were less impressed by the sound of the uncovered songs after a snippet was played on Radio 4’s Today show:

McHugh said the songs were cut from the Broadway musical due to reasons of length rather than quality.

“All the accounts say the show was wonderful at the first preview, but that it went on all night. It really needed a bit of trimming. They were very clever at finding a solution that still worked in dramatic terms,” he said.

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins in 'My Fair Lady', the musical adaptation of 'Pygmalion' (Rex Features)

My Fair Lady went on to become an Oscar-winning film starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza in 1965.

The scores will be performed at a special concert in Sheffield’s Firth Hall, titled Accustomed to Her Face: The Lost Songs of My Fair Lady, on Tuesday 19 May.