A charming 'Lady'
My Fair Lady at the TBPAC features a sparkling star, a wonderfully complex set and splendid choreography.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published September 14, 2007
Many people call My Fair Lady the perfect musical, and it's tough to argue with them. The score by Alan Jay Lerner book and lyrics and Frederick Loewe (music) is loaded with one wonderful song after another, and the dialogue is pure George Bernard Shaw - virtually verbatim from Pygmalion, making it the rare musical in which the talking (and there is a lot of it) can be as engrossing as the singing.
But perfection is daunting. There hasn't been a high-profile revival of My Fair Lady that tried to uncover something new in the work - until now.
Three things especially stand out in the splendid production that opened Thursday night at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. (There was a preview on Wednesday.) First and foremost, in Lisa O'Hare, it has an ingenue with real star quality as Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower seller whom phonetics professor Henry Higgins takes on as a pupil, betting his tweedy colleague, Colonel Pickering, that he can teach her to speak impeccable English and pass her off as a duchess at the embassy ball.
O'Hare, trained as a ballet dancer, brings a feisty, tomboyish energy to Eliza's combat with Higgins. Her singing is a bit unconventional in that she doesn't have the bright pear-shaped tones of the classic English soprano (i.e., Julie Andrews). Instead, her voice is darker and sexier in gems such as I Could Have Danced All Night and Show Me.
Anthony Ward's set is another highlight. A massive, complex affair, it changes smoothly from depicting a rainy night outside the Covent Garden opera to Higgins' book-lined study to the Ascot racetrack to early morning at Eliza's old flower market.
The production's other outstanding aspect is the choreography and musical staging of Matthew Bourne, whose imprint is seen right away in the opening scene, a moody collage of buskers, street vendors and operagoers that takes the place of the traditional overture. Bourne's staging of the big dance numbers of Eliza's ne'er-do-well father, Alfred Doolittle - With a Little Bit of Luck and Get Me to the Church on Time - draws wittily from both English vaudeville and the garbage can lid percussion of Stomp. Ascot Gavotte is a stylish study in black and gold.
All this may not quite amount to the My Fair Lady of your dreams - that will always be the incomparable 1956 Broadway staging, brilliantly preserved on the original cast recording - but it's hard to imagine anything better these days. The production, a hit in London that never transferred to Broadway, was remounted at the TBPAC for a U.S. tour, produced by English impresario Cameron Mackintosh and others. It runs three hours, including intermission.
Christopher Cazenove doesn't entirely banish the memory of Rex Harrison in his performance as that confirmed old bachelor and misogynist, Higgins, but he does a fine job of inspiring Eliza in what may be musical theater's single most exhilarating scene, the speech lesson that flows into The Rain in Spain. He also takes appropriate glee in the professor's deeply incorrect pronouncements on women, such as A Hymn to Him.
As Eliza's ardent suitor, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Justin Bohon tries to make up for his lack of vocal heft by bringing a hammy sincerity to On the Street Where You Live, but the song falls flat. Tim Jerome does some terrific hoofing as Alfred Doolittle, portraying the dustman as the personification of Shaw's life force. He steals each scene he is in. Alma Cuervo is excellent as Higgins' housekeeper and foil, Mrs. Pearce.
It is a special treat to have Sally Ann Howes playing Mrs. Higgins, proving that you can go home again. Having played Eliza on Broadway 50 years ago, Howes returns to give an elegant, hilarious performance as the professor's dowager mother.
The revival, directed by Trevor Nunn and restaged for the tour by Shaun Kerrison, does have some naughty touches that betray a kind of schoolboy sensibility that doesn't add much. There is a suggestion that Pickering (Walter Charles) could be a cross-dressing colonel, and Freddy has become a drunk by the second act.
Thursday's show was not without some raggedness, including occasional balance problems between orchestra and singers and a dropped line here and there. A technical glitch with the set stopped the show for a few minutes near the end of the first act, but it got back on track with a funny ad lib by Freddy.
The original My Fair Lady's sumptuous orchestrations (by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang) have been supplanted by the scaled-down versions of William David Brohn. Conducted by James Lowe, the 15-piece orchestra has its moments - such as the flashy gypsy fiddle in You Did It and the deft xylophone throughout the score - but for all of Brohn's resourcefulness, you miss the full sound of musical theater's golden age.
John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.Review
My Fair Lady
The Lerner and Loewe musical has performances at 8 tonight and 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $32.50-$67.50. (813) 229-7827; www.tbpac.org.