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Straight outta London's West End (video trailer) where it ran for two years at Drury Lane, this revival of Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady is only at the Paramount through Sunday, May 4. Tickets are $25-$72. Anglophiles, if you have the slightest inclination, we advise you to hoof it on over; this one's as English as a tea, fried tomato and egg breakfast--as befits a Cameron Mackintosh and the National Theatre of Great Britain production. Musical fans, you won't believe the number of hit songs. Patriots, there's a good joke about the French. Talk about crowd-pleasing.
The set-up is that Professor Higgins (Christopher Cazenove) and a fellow linguistics enthusiast, Col. Pickering (Walter Charles), make a bet whether Higgins can, after training her, pass off a poor Cockney flower girl as upper-crust. The drama has to do with "confirmed old bachelor" Higgins learning to make room for someone in his life, and Eliza Doolittle (Lisa O'Hare) finding that gentility isn't all in your accent, but lies in how you see yourself.
Cazenove instructs like a drill sergeant, and struts and bellows pridefully as a bull (romance being a china-shop), bringing a tad more growly vocal range to the role than suave singspieler Rex Harrison. O'Hare gives you a reedy, ambitious Doolittle, with a pleasant but light singing voice. (You can hear her pause and take a steadying breath before the big note at the end of "I Could Have Danced All Night.") Naturally a scene-stealer (Tim Jerome) was cast as Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza's gloriously reprobate father--everything about him is ruins: wild white hair, dented face, whiskey-and-cigarette voice. And Marni Nixon, who famously supplied the singing chops in the Audrey Hepburn film, sails grandly throughout as Mrs. Higgins.
Does anyone still talk about transactional analysis anymore? The difference between what people can give and what they want in return is what generates the dramatic sparks, the comedic flashes. Higgins trades his instruction for greater status--everyone must admit he's a genius. But he really hopes Eliza will not only understand him but stand up to him. Eliza arrives willing to pay for voice lessons, but stays because she's gained Higgins' complete attention (Alfred was more of an absentee father).
Things come to a head when the cover story for their relationship, the bet, ends. Higgins has no reason to continue to play Eliza's father figure, and Eliza has outgrown her old dreams. Eliza's enlightenment leaves them both in a pickle (her retreat to her old Covent Garden stomping grounds has her meeting up with a band of suffragettes).
Eliza threatens Higgins with her interest in the besotted but useless Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Justin Bohon, managing to keep that upper-class twit's accent even while singing, despite a voice not quite up to the score's demands), and Higgins threatens Eliza with her former destitution. They're both brutal, in their way, and the production's only truly false note comes when they throw their heads back and laugh at the very end. There are a lot of worthy responses to "Fetch my slippers!" but that's not one of them.
Trevor Nunn's business-like direction opts for speed and pep over lollygagging around; scenes come hard on each other's heels. Yet he opens up time for Matthew Bourne's choreography, which is often simply good but occasionally eye-opening, mostly during the ensemble scenes involving Alfred Doolittle. At one point there's a bit of Stomp! with trashcan lids, at another, a swirling, boozy anarchy that is nonetheless a work of amazing precision and timing. Bourne's take on the Ascot crowds is almost a stand-alone piece: snoot-etry in motion.
My Fair Lady is presented here by Broadway Across America, but Broadway's pumped-up razzle-dazzle is mercifully absent. The set is both astonishingly overstuffed and understated, in that everything works to simply be what it's supposed to be. It just happens to come apart in six million pieces and fly out in three or four seconds. The centerpiece is Professor Higgins' book-lined study, a cathedral embodying his love of words. Not just any words, of course. English ones.
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i so wanted to go to this. such a sucker for corny musicals.
Not even a shout-out to old G.B. Shaw?
kitty wu: Corny? Why it's pure hoku-- genius! I mean, it sounds like it, with the British accent and all.
bilco: you're right, and my apologies to GBS. I just could feel that if I mentioned him and his "Pygmalion" I'd end up writing another 300 words giving more context that the musical only hints at. And I was tired.
Fascinating. A friend of mine felt almost all the performers were phoning it in, save for Ms. Nixon and the guy playing Freddy, and overall hated the production so much he left at intermission. But he's a traditionalist. And opinionated. I can't decide whether to go and decide for myself or not. I'll probably just listen to the Broadway original cast recording and spend my money on a local theater troupe doing something completely different.
The night I was there, they got a standing ovation. Of course Seattleites *always* give a standing ovation, but in this instance, the audience seemed actually moved, too. So I would disagree with the "phoned in" report, though you do tend to get a certain workmanlike performance with touring shows. I think that's the nature of the touring beast, not the cast's fault.
One thing that I could carp about was the over-miked sound. It was dialed up to extra bright, to compensate for the Paramount's top-end-eating qualities, I guess. On the one hand, you could understand the words; on the other, it gave everything a brassy tone.