What might have proven awkward as a confidence spoken to the audience became one of the transcendent moments of My Fair Lady as it vaults into song. Young Freddy Eynsford-Hill, an idle socialite, has just encountered Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl whose transformation into a proper English lady is the nominal subject of the musical. But Freddy has been introduced to her at a yeasty juncture well before the metamorphosis is assured and complete. Eliza's unvarnished vivacity and street-smart straight talk ("Why gin was like mother's milk to 'er"), breaking through the still thin veneer of propriety, possess a freshness and touch of nature irresistibly attractive in the socially stiff ambience of opening day at the Ascot races. Freddy has tracked her to the home of her benefactor, mentor, and tyrannical speech coach, the world-famed phoneticist Professor Henry Higgins, outside of which he loiters in voluble rapture. Alan Jay Lerner's lyrics capture imperishably that evanescent moment of falling in love -- the tremendum of feeling released delivering one into inflated giddiness, the putative proximity of the beloved ("at any moment you may suddenly appear") suffusing the commonplace with an aura of enchantment. Lerner must have known the phenomenon quite well -- though he was with only his third wife (actress Nancy Olson, to whom he became engaged but ten days after their first meeting) during the My Fair Lady years, he was to be married no less than eight times, always to younger women. On the other hand, the sexually precocious piano prodigy and lifelong bachelor, Frederick Loewe, took a more prescient view. Despite the fact that he composed music for some of the most memorable songs of the American musical theater, Loewe could assert "I never was really a songwriter. I always considered myself a dramatic composer. A dramatic composer is someone that can illustrate in music any emotion." For "On the Street Where You Live," the suavely jogging melody breaking into expansive flight ("O! The towering feeling...") is a case in point, not only paying tribute to Freddy's impetuously infatuated rush but deftly characterizing him as someone so immensely self-absorbed by it that the audience immediately grasps that, for all his grandiloquence, he is, as a lover, a no-starter. The song underlines the dramatic rightness of Lerner's revamping of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, by having Eliza return to Henry -- Shaw foresaw her marrying Freddy and opening a flower shop to support him. ~ All Music Guide
