A glittery 'My Fair Lady' that would actually make Shaw proud
Photo by Joan Marcus.
It may be because tours only get so much time in each new space to finesse. It may have been because I was seated a mite too close to the stage-right speaker tower. Either way, I wasn't altogether pleased with the sound setup at My Fair Lady. This is an issue when one is mounting a production of one of the crispest libretti ever written for the Broadway stage, one that is in part about language itself.
Of course, My Fair Lady is a bona fide classic that one should have committed to heart. But director Bartlett Sher has made a name for himself by tackling the postwar musicals of yore by paying utmost attention to every word in the text and bringing out the nuances within that most resonate with twenty-first century audiences. To hear the words anew, it helps to hear them.
But, sound issues notwithstanding, the words that do make it across the footlights—that evergreen craft of librettist Alan Jay Lerner, abetted by composer Frederick Loewe—prove that Sher's take on My Fair Lady, now on national tour, is a production that would please the bumptious old Bernard Shaw: sparkling with wit and decidedly non-romantic.
Ever since the first production of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady's source play, Shaw averred that the idly rich phonetician Henry Higgins and guttersnipe flower girl Eliza Doolittle, being paired by a wager, were hardly an It Couple for the ages. For whatever reason, no one really listened to him, and the tale has been popularly accepted as a romance ever since. Sher, himself abetted by increasingly audible conversations on the battle of the sexes and the classes, seems determined to give the old man his fair shake. To that end, his Eliza, Shereen Ahmed, is a crackerjack, a songbird with a spine of steel. Inversely, though—too inversely, maybe—his Higgins, Laird Mackintosh, is a prig par excellence, to be polite, even as they do what they can to nudge the role out of Rex Harrison's sprechstimme shadow. His Freddy, Sam Simahk, is loose in posture and sense, however much his "On the Street Where You Live" pierces. And his Alfred Doolittle, Martin Fisher...well, he was already a useless layabout, albeit armed with steel-trap knees-up tunes.
The point being: Sher may have put his thumb on the scale when it wasn't entirely necessary to do so.
And there is some debate as to just how serious Shaw was about Higgins and Eliza's prospects...
Loewe's music, as performed with as full an orchestrations as economics allow, will perhaps always give that Irishman the side-eye. And Lerner, in fairness, only offers this in the way of how to end the piece: "There are tears in Eliza's eyes. She understands."
Endlessly playable, no? Endlessly digestible. Endlessly loverly.
My Fair Lady runs through July 10th at Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W Randolph St. For tickets or more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit broadwayinchicago.com.