My Fair Lady
Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
Music by Frederick Loewe
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Starring Lisa O'Hare, Christopher Cazenove
Produced by Cameron Mackintosh and the National Theatre of Great Britain
At the Toronto Centre for the Arts
A tour of an old chestnut like My Fair Lady wouldn't normally be an event, but this one marks the long-awaited reopening of the Toronto Centre for the Arts to large-scale musicals.
Garth Drabinsky's old haunt in North York has been in mothballs since the Livent founder became embroiled in his current legal imbroglio, so this production offers a chance to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with the space for the first time this millennium. While its location leaves something to be desired, its sightlines and sound are indeed loverly. What a crime that it has been so under-used for so long.
To the show: You are surely familiar with Lerner and Loewe's triumphant 1954 musical, adapted from Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, in which Professor Henry Higgins takes Cockney-speaking flower girl Eliza Doolittle and teaches her how to speak like a proper lady as part of a bet with Colonel Pickering (in the study, with the Victrola).
Lisa O’Hare is as good an Eliza Doolittle as you are likely to find anywhere today. (Joan Marcus)
Directed by Trevor Nunn, this opulent, long-running revival began at the National Theatre of Great Britain back when the Twin Towers still towered. It transferred to the West End in the summer of 2001, scooped up a few Olivier awards, then embarked on a U.K. tour. Last fall, it landed on these shores and has been reigning over North America's plains ever since.
As soon as the curtain goes up, it's clear we're in the hands of none other than Nunn, whose signature crowd scenes pour over the overture.
Nunn, whose epic productions include Les Misérables and the 8-hour Nicholas Nickleby that recently passed through Toronto in abridged form, has taken this most beloved of musicals and megasized it, mostly successfully.
Even the smaller songs morph into big production numbers doused in eye-catching choreography by Matthew Bourne. A Little Bit of Luck turns into a Stomp-inspired clatter of dance and drumming, while Get Me to the Church on Time turns into an 11 o'clock show-stopper complete with showgirls. Designer Anthony Ward's production is visually gorgeous, especially the costumes – Eliza's peacock-eye Ascot hat being a highlight.
Sometimes, however, you wish the bombast would get out of the way of the show. Show Me, where Eliza demands a little less conversation, a little more action from her suitor Freddy, involves a trip on the London Underground and a protest with suffragettes holding placards that say “Deeds not words.” Given that it takes place at night, this exhausting staging doesn't make any sense – except perhaps as a sop to modern audiences who have trouble swallowing Higgins' misogyny.
The best reason to recommend this My Fair Lady is the ethereal Lisa O'Hare, who has played Mary Poppins on the West End and is as good an Eliza Doolittle as you are likely to find anywhere today. She's as funny and beautiful as Audrey Hepburn – even resembles her in figure and heart-shaped face – but she also has a crystal-clear singing voice that makes I Could Have Danced All Night and Wouldn't It Be Loverly? delightful.
Hepburn, of course, didn't sing her own songs in the film of My Fair Lady. They were overdubbed by Marni Nixon, who did the same for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story. In a fan-pleasing touch, Nixon appears in this production as Mrs. Higgins, impressing with her crisp acting rather than her voice (a bit of a pity she doesn't have a song).
As the cantankerous Higgins, Christopher Cazenove follows the Rex Harrison mode of speak-singing the part. His characterization of the phonetician's bullying brilliance reminds one of a slightly more genial and infinitely more sober Christopher Hitchens, but he has little chemistry with O'Hare. My Fair Lady is a most unusual musical in its ambiguous relationship between its leading man and lady; here, it is almost impossible to imagine the two getting together and a moment where they seem as if they might kiss is almost revolting.
To stack the deck in Higgins' favour, Freddy Eynsford-Hill is played as a particularly inbred upper-class twit by Justin Bohon. His horsey accent and general unlikeability may make dramatic sense, but it diminishes On the Street Where You Live, arguably the most beautiful song in Loewe's perfect score. (The book is Lerner's best too, even if he does rhyme Budapest with “so rude a pest.”)
Tim Jerome's Alfred P. Doolittle is a little too realistically rough around the edges for my tastes, but he is the only performer aside from O'Hare who shows no sign of having been on tour for the past year. When his passage to his nuptials was further delayed for a few minutes by a technical glitch that halted a set in mid-air, he relaunched mid-number with admirable gusto.
There were a variety of other minor missed or misfired cues, as the Toronto Centre for the Arts creakily roused itself from its eight-year beauty sleep. Let's hope that under the new management of Dancap Productions, its slumbering days are over.
My Fair Lady runs until May 31st at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
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