Bringing the marvelous Alan-Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe My Fair Lady back to Broadway at Lincoln Center’s big, big Beaumont stage, director Bartlett Sher seems to have had no less than Henrik Ibsen in mind. Not that Sher’s possibly intentional, possibly unconscious inclination is that odd. Shaw was a vocal Ibsen champion at a time when many others may not have been.
But more of that later, after grateful observations are listed about the grand plusses of the revival and a few notes on the minuses. So what if Lerner, whose centenary this is, switched Shaw’s initial stage direction from “Torrents of heavy spring rain” to “a cold March”? Hardly a calamitous alteration. It certainly alleviates the need to pour water on Michael Yeargan’s capacious set, over which Henry Higgins’ Edwardian home frequently glides slowly forward and back.
At another moment many may notice, but fewer might care, that the intermission occurs at a different spot. Earlier, more Shaw-Lerner aficionados could tense at the absence of the buskers who appear busking at the very start of the action.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
But these are minor when compared with the fast introduction of squalling flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Lauren Ambrose), briskly annoyed at being closely observed by phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton) while India-dialect expert Colonel Pickering (Allan Corduner) looks on.
Just about instantly, it’s clear that the cherished musical comedy roles are in good hands. The ginger-haired Ambrose will tidily handle Eliza’s transition from put-upon street urchin to intelligent woman of the world. Hadden-Paton will expertly shape Higgins as a professionally competent, socially dense fellow who has no clue to recognizing his developing feelings about Eliza. Corduner charms as a great good companion.
Norbert Leo Butz as unwilling moralist Alfred P. Doolittle appropriates every scene in which he figures, and Diana Rigg—not on a Manhattan stage since 1994, when she won a Tony as Medea—is a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Mrs. Higgins.
With those performers not only acting but singing—and occasionally dancing—this My Fair Lady moves bracingly along. The musical Higgins is known for his speak-sing attack due to the curtailed singing abilities of original interpreter Rex Harrison, but Haddon-Paton, new to these shores (but a Downton Abbey alumnus), actually has formidable pipes. He shows them off sleekly on “Why Can’t the English?” as well as on “I’m an Ordinary Man” and “A Hymn to Him.”
Ambrose—several years ago an intended Fanny Brice in a Funny Girl revival that never materialized—astounds the house on “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Without You” and, with a Covent Garden-based male quartet, is part of the lilting “ Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”
Jordan Donica, playing Freddy Eynsford-Hill unleashes a “On the Street Where You Live.” And as for Butz, he’s the irresistible focus of the production’s most exciting routine, the expanded “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Seemingly greatly expanded from the original number—does this mean the Robert Russell Bennett orchestration and Trude Rittman dance arrangement have been lengthened?—it involves Butz terping and performing top-hot tricks while can-can girls, all rousingly choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, lift their skirts.
Gattelli also does commendably well by “Ascot Gavotte,” where noses-in-the-air English upper-class members promenade in Catherine Zuber’s striking uniformly gray outfits. (Cecil Beaton favored black-and-white, of course. So Zuber’s is a clever meeting-halfway affair.)
Gattelli’s choreography is less grand during the embassy ball sequence, when only six couples execute much of the waltzing. And for some reason not exclusively Gattelli’s, the ebullience during “The Rain in Spain”—when Eliza, Higgins and Pickering celebrate her proper vowel break-through—registers as unusually subdued.
Maybe the toned-down “Rain in Spain” eruption can be traced to the Ibsen tone affecting Sher’s take. It definitely obtains at the end but, because a spoiler lurks, won’t be explicitly described. Suffice it to say that at one point, the perceptive Mrs. Higgins chides Pickering and her son for treating Eliza like a “living doll.”
Could this phrase have put Sher in mind of A Doll’s House? Perhaps, beause to an extent, Nora and Eliza are similar—a happenstance that Shaw surely recognized. (Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote Pygmalion, had also appeared as Nora.)
As Shaw indicates of Eliza in his penultimate stage direction, “She sweeps out.“ So of course does Nora. Where Eliza doesn’t sweep out is in Lerner’s version. There, she remains at Higgins’ 27A Wimpole Street, probably about to fetch Higgins the slippers he demands while knowing everything she needs to know about him.
Lerner is on record as promoting his more or less happy ending because he believes Shaw to be wrong about the prospects for a longer Higgins-Eliza alliance.
Apparently Sher and Shaw agree heartily. They’re so much in tandem on the Ibsen-esque conclusion that Sher stages a sweeping-out of such dimensions that it has the potential to put off many a Shaw and Lerner partisan. I’m one of those dismayed and so have to enter a dissenting vote.
Though the offending sweep-out occurs during the final My Fair Lady moments, it can’t completely distract anyone from the abundant successes of the revival. Enough of it is a potent reminder that Lerner, Loewe (with original director Moss Hart) were able to take a property that others couldn’t tame—Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers backed off—into one of the most entertaining musicals ever written.
My Fair Lady opened April 19, 2018, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Tickets and information: ltc.org
