Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
music by Frederick Loewe, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Trevor Nunn
National Theatre of Great Britain/Dancap Productions, Toronto Centre for the Arts, Toronto
May 9-31, 2008
The fourth Dancap show to hit town is a real winner. Its presentation of My Fair Lady is the best production of this classic musical you are ever likely to see. As directed by Trevor Nunn this production first seen at London’s National Theatre in 2001 easily trumps the Stratford Festival’s last two productions in every way.
Director Trevor Nunn finally gives us a version of this story that makes sense. Bernard Shaw’s source play Pygmalion (1913) has the more enlightened ending where Eliza, having outgrown him, leaves Professor Higgins forever, whereas the musical’s book writer Alan Jay Lerner changes this to a more conventional and less logical ending where the two principals fall in love. Director Trevor Nunn solves this problem by showing from the Eliza’s first visit to Higgins’ home that Higgins’ plan to transform Eliza and her desire to be transformed are underpinned by mutual attraction. This turns Higgins’ frequent misogynist rants to frustrated bluster and the show’s insulting last line, “Eliza, fetch me my slippers” into a joke.
Christopher Cazenove is an ideal Higgins, pompous, self-concerned but unnerved by the unfamiliar feelings Eliza evokes in him. His semi-talking/semi-singing style recalls Rex Harrison throughout. Lisa O’Hare is wonderful as the transformed Eliza with a lovely operetta-style voice, but is strangely less convincing as Eliza the flower-seller so that her metamorphosis is not as eye-opening as it should be. Walter Charles’s Colonel Pickering is more warmly comic than usual, while Tim Jerome is boistrous and funny as Eliza’s dustman father, Alfred P. Doolittle. A special treat for lovers of musicals the Mrs. Higgins of Marni Nixon, she who did the singing for Audrey Hepburn in the famous 1964 film.
Anthony Ward’s set are marvelous, especially Higgins’s massive library and his costumes are delightfully outrageous in the all-black Ascot scene, though, except for Eliza’s gown, they are oddly plain in the Embassy Ball scene. Matthew Bourne’s choreography gives the show a modern edge though he does go too far in turning “With a Little Bit of Luck” into a precursor of Stomp. In contrast, his “Get Me to the Church on Time” is both imaginative and appropriate as he takes Doolittle on a frenzied pre-nuptial crawl through all the dives of London. Nunn’s direction is so detailed and the performances so vivid that they make this much-loved musical seem fresh and new.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-05-12.
Photo: Lisa O’Hare and Christopher Cazenove. ©Michael Le Poer Trench.
2008-05-12
My Fair Lady