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music by Frederick Loewe, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Molly Smith

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 28-October 30, 2011

“Loverly!”

The Shaw Festival’s first-ever production of My Fair Lady may be the best you are ever likely to see.  All the experience the Shaw Festival brings to productions of Shaw it brings to the most famous musical based on one of Shaw’s plays.  The result is a highly nuanced production of My Fair Lady in which the dialogue and the musical numbers are extraordinarily detailed.

Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) presents a challenge to every potential director.  Lerner’s “happy ending” where Eliza comes back to the misogynist Professor Higgins may have suited the conservative 1950s, but contradicts Shaw’s ending where the student comes to realize she has surpassed her teacher and leaves him.  To make Lerner’s ending work, a director has to conceive of the couple rather like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick and show us how they fall in love despite their constant arguing and professions to the contrary. 

This is precisely what director Molly Smith does.  From the moment when Deborah Hay’s Eliza calls on Benedict Campbell’s Professor Higgins, we sense that both are delighted to see each other again despite Higgins’ habitually insulting language.  Smith uses “The Rain in Spain” not merely as Eliza’s breakthrough in language but as the first expression of tenderness between Higgins and Eliza, when Higgins overcomes his physical reticence to ask Eliza to dance.  Smith has Higgins sing his various anti-female songs like “I’m an Ordinary man” and “A Hymn to Him” with the kind of bluster the hides insecurity.  Indeed, she gives all Higgins’ rants against women this quality so that the musical alters Shaw’s original scheme by having both Eliza and Higgins learn something about themselves from each other.  As a result of this careful preparation, the ending finally works.

Most directors are content just to make the musical look pretty, but Molly Smith takes the brilliant approach of highlighting the ambiguous imagery embedded in the play.  It’s an odd detail in both the play and the musical that the one non-essential item Eliza brings with her when she moves into Higgins’s house and takes with her when she leaves is a bird in a cage.  While for Eliza it may be one bit of nature to cheer up her dingy surroundings, it is also a symbol of how Higgins views Eliza as a woman entrapped by her low class dialect.  However, after her transformation, Eliza notes that she feels less free than she did before because of all the rules of upperclass society she now must follow.  To emphasize this idea, set designer Ken MacDonald puts a Victorian birdcage in Higgins’s study and has the outlines of Higgins’s house replicate the outlines of the birdcage.  Besides this, Smith has all the scene changes accompanied by Adam Larsen’s digital projections of birds in flight swooping in formation.  In no previous production of the play or the musical has it been so clear that Eliza and Higgins are both trapped by certain conventions and that Higgins only helps Eliza move from one kind of cage to another. 

The show has an excellent cast.  Deborah Hay brings something to the role that is far too often forgotten--a sense of comedy.  Not only is she a fine singer, but, as she amply demonstrated as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday last year she is a natural comedienne.  Hay makes Eliza’s frustration with Higgins’s linguistic techniques absolutely hilarious with her gift for timing and physical comedy.  The scene where she tries to speak with marbles in her mouth is priceless.  But, Hay also is able to convey a sense of vulnerability so that we root for her all through her linguistic training and her public appearances and feel her desolation when no one congratulates her for her success.  Its a delightful, wonderfully warm performance from start to finish.

Benedict Campbell is an exceptional Higgins in that he does not adopt the traditional speaking-to-music technique made famous by Rex Harrison, but rather actually sings Higgins’s songs.  This has a major positive effect on how we perceive the character.  Not condescending to sing like everybody else makes Higgins seem even more aloof.  To have him sing thus already breaks down a key barrier between his character and the others and helps to make him and Eliza more alike.  That Campbell is also a fine singer only makes his interpretation more sympathetic, especially in a song like “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”. 

Neil Barclay is an ideal Alfred Doolittle.  His years at the Shaw have taught him how to bring out the various levels of humour in Doolittle’s speeches and actions and her certainly knows how to put across a song and dance.  Mark Uhre is lovestruck as Freddy Eynsford-Hill but not daft has he is often portrayed.  This is much more appropriate for a character who sings such a powerful song as “On the Street Where You Live”.  Uhre gives a full-voiced operatic performance of the song that bowls you over with its beauty.

In contrast, Patrick Galligan as Colonel Pickering is no singer though he does his best in “You Did It”.  Yet, he provides a genial parallel to Higgins by making Pickering as academically minded and as hopelessly impractical as Higgins.  This, along with Patty Jamieson’s bemused eye-rolling as Mrs. Pearce, helps to neutralize the adolescent misogyny the two men express.  Sharry Flett’s commanding Mrs. Higgins, who knows so well her son’s faults, also helps to balance the scale between male and female power.

Choreographer Daniel Pelzig turns Alfred Doolittle’s two numbers into colourful, energetic dance pieces.  “With a Little Bit of Luck” even morphs into a clever Stomp-like interlude on found instruments.  Costume designer Judith Bowden makes the denizens of Covent Garden actually look poor and grubby for a change, happily eschewing the decorously patched, tidy garb that glamorizes the lower class.  She also eschews the black and white costumes that have become standard since Cecil Beaton’s famous designs and instead makes the gowns and extravagant millinery of the grands dames at the Ascot Races a riot of colour.   

My Fair Lady is one of those rare musicals where the dialogue is as delightful as the music.  Molly Smith’s production treats both with such flair and detail that you may find seeing the show once is not enough.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Benedict Campbell and Deborah Hay. ©2011 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.