When I flipped through my stack of Nat King Cole reissues from Collector’s Choice, one that instantly caught my eye was Nat King Cole Sings My Fair Lady. Now how on earth is he going to sing some of those songs? Naturally, Nat’s going to sing those songs how he always sings those songs: expertly.

When My Fair Lady opened on Broadway in 1956, it ran for 2717 performances and became the longest running musical of that era. A film version was planned and the project began in August of 1963. About that time, Nat King Cole and his production team, including arranger Ralph Carmichael, started recording with a full orchestra and a 12-voice vocal choir to lay down tracks for an album dedicated to the Loewe and Lerner production.

Many of the songs from the musical were naturally witty, but Cole’s production and delivery on the tunes adds more zing and gives them an entirely different spin. The ordering of the songs is interesting, too. The placement of “Get Me to the Church on Time” just after the anti-marriage anthem “I’m an Ordinary Man” is teasingly incongruous and reshuffles the deck from the production.

Cole wisely chose to interpret almost the entire score, ignoring the idea to select some of the best songs from the play for a sort of rudimentary compilation. As a result of this, we get the Nat King Cole spin on “I Could Have Danced All Night” and other musical devices merely intended to move the plot along. This helps gives the album a character of its own, avoiding the natural trappings of doing a “soundtrack” recording.

Cole may appear to shuffle and struggle with some of the more narcissistic songs, as his trademark modesty might make him a surprise stand-in for Rex Harrison’s trademark wit and egotistical style. Nevertheless, Nat is more than able to create his own sense of poise on songs like “You Did It” and the aforementioned “I’m an Ordinary Man.”

So immersed in the material is Nat King Cole that he manages to ingeniously spin “Show Me,” a song written for the play’s heroine, into a pensive love song by tinkering with the tempo a little. His ability to turn a diatribe into a ballad grants new meaning to the material and makes the recording his own.

This is one of Nat King Cole’s most ambitious and extravagant albums, if only for the fact that the recording of it was so colossal and the sound is huge and generous. Cole’s work with the vocal choir and symphony is natural and he comes across very secure with the material, thus saving the day on what could have been a formula for mediocrity.