It was the 50th anniversary London touring company version of My Fair Lady that we went to see last night. Great sets, casting, Matthew Bourne choreography, all that. But Joan and I, being the trivia nerds that we are, wanted to see Marni Nixon playing the non-singing role of Henry Higgins' mother. Normal people may not know that Marni Nixon, decades ago, was the "singing voice" of Audrey Hepburn in the movie version of My Fair Lady, as well as the dubbed singing voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, and others. One of the oddities of movie musicals in the 50s and the early 60s was that a marquee-name actor would get the roles, not actors that could actually sing. Marni Nixon finally got her face (and voice) on film as one of the nuns in The Sound of Music.
Before the theater, Jerry, Joan and I had a wonderful dinner, Cuban cuisine, at Cafe Havana. It was sort of our "farewell, Fidel!" dinner. Say what you will about Castro, but he outlived all his contemporaries and overlapped ten U.S. Presidencies.
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