"The Rain in Spain" is a song from the musicalMy Fair Lady, with music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. The song was published in 1956, sounding similar to . The song is a turning point in the plotline of the musical. Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering have been drilling Eliza Doolittle incessantly with speech exercises, trying to break her Cockney accent speech pattern. The key lyric in the song is "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain", which contains five words that a Cockney would pronounce with or – more like "eye" than the Received Pronunciation diphthong. With the three of them nearly exhausted, Eliza finally "gets it", and recites the sentence with all "proper" long-As. The trio breaks into song, repeating this key phrase as well as singing other exercises correctly, such as "In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen", in which Eliza had failed before by dropping the leading 'H'.
Origin
The phrase does not appear in Shaw's original play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, but it is used in the 1938 film of the play. According to The Disciple and His Devil, the biography of Gabriel Pascal by his wife Valerie, it was he who introduced the famous phonetic exercises "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" and "In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen" into the script of the film, both of which were later used in the song in My Fair Lady.
In other languages
Versions of "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" in various languages include:
Hebrew: ""
Hungarian: "Lenn délen édes éjen édent remélsz."
Spanish: "La lluvia en Sevilla es una pura maravilla" playing with the sound of the "ll".
A 1985 British television commercial for Heineken parodies the scene. Sylvestra Le Touzel plays a woman who speaks posh, and after a drink of Heineken a cockney accent appears. It was ranked at number 9 in Campaign Live's 2008 list of the "Top 10 Funniest TV Ads of All Time", and at number 29 in Channel 4's list of the "100 Greatest TV Ads" in 2000.
In the Family Guy episode "One If by Clam, Two If by Sea", Stewie tries to teach a girl to lose her Cockney accent. Together, he and Eliza sing a parody, "The Life of The Wife is Ended by the Knife."
The satirical revue Forbidden Broadway set up playwright David Mamet as being exasperated with Madonna's acting style with the lyrics, "I strain in vain to train Madonna's brain." The song is included on the albumForbidden Broadway, Vol. 2.
The Simpsons episode "My Fair Laddy" is itself a parody of My Fair Lady, and includes the song "Not On My Clothes".
In Stephen King's book, , he writes a parody titled The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain. King's novel Salem's Lot also features his changed lyrics recited by Mark Petrie.
In the 1956–59 revue At the Drop of a Hat, Michael Flanders observes in a brief comic monologue that: "Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, the rain in Spain stays almost invariably in the hills."
