NEW HAVEN — The snow was coming down. The turntables didn’t turn. The star refused to perform. The cast was dismissed, thinking that that night’s show would not go on.

Yet “My Fair Lady” opened improbably, triumphantly, to its first paying audience on that Saturday, Feb. 4, 1956, at the Shubert Theater here, making the night the stuff of theater legend.

The out-of-town circuit for shows destined for Broadway — and its pressure cooker atmosphere — has largely been replaced with the more measured pace of readings, workshops and developmental productions at regional theaters and presenting houses. The latest, highly anticipated revival of “My Fair Lady,” which opens on April 19 at Lincoln Center Theater, was developed in-house. And the weather forecast is expected to be more kind.

But in 1956, signs of trouble for the new musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” came early. In the days before opening, the production’s turntables, a new kind of cable-driven stage device, failed to work properly.