My Fair Lady co-stars Norbert Leo Butz, Lauren Ambrose, Dame Diana Rigg, and Harry Hadden-Paton, with spectators dressed up for Ascot (Melody Bates, Kate Marilley, and Matt Wall) on the balcony; photographed at the Beekman hotel, in New York City.

What kind of nutter would stage a revival of My Fair Lady, the Lerndr and Loewe classic that made a Broadway star of Julie Andrews as the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, a peerless performance matched in charm if not in voice by Audrey Hepburn in the gloriously glossy film? And who would be daft enough to muck with the memory of Rex Harrison, whose portrayal of the arrogant Professor Henry Higgins won him both a Tony and an Oscar; if Sir Rex didn't exactly teach the world to sing, he did teach it to talk on pitch. Director Bartlett Sher—who was also brilliantly insane enough in recent years to blow the dust off South Pacific and The King and I—is the daft nutter behind this latest revival. My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, and the combination of Shaw's dialogue, in Lerner's swift-moving adaptation, and those songs (pick your favorite: "I Could Have Danced All Might" or "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" or "Get Me to the Church on Time" or...) proved irresistible to Sher, not to mention the sexual and class dynamics (no updating needed there!) at play in Edwardian London. Sher's revival, which opens in March at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, features Lauren Ambrose (perhaps 'best known as Claire Fisher in HBO's Six Feet Under) and Harry Hadden-Paton (Bertie, who married Lady Edith on Downton Abbey) as Professor Higgins. Two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz, late of Netflix's Bloodline, plays Eliza's scheming dad, and Dame Diana Rigg (let's just say Emma Peel, of the TV series The Avengers, and lament to ourselves that this is not a cover story) is Henry's mother. By George, she's still got it.