Theater Review: ‘My Fair Lady,’ at Lincoln Center

My Fair Lady may well be my favorite Broadway-originated musical. (For musicals that began life on the big screen, I reserve top honors for Singing in the Rain.) It’s not just that the “book” borrows heavily and appropriately from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but that its songs—most of which entered the Great American Songbook long ago—long ago seeped into my memory. Seldom have wit and heart become so conjoined in the entire history of musical theater.

Those two qualities are what I have come back to, again and again, in thinking of how much I enjoyed the revival of this great musical—with the passage of time, still one of the half-dozen greatest in the history of that art form, in my opinion—now taking place at Lincoln Center. The show had already been running there since spring, and I counted myself lucky it was still around for me to enjoy it. 

As I write this review, it’s still open, but even the best things in life don’t last forever, so I urge anyone who hasn’t seen it yet—heck, anyone who has one of those days when they feel down at the mouth—to run out and buy a ticket.

Not unlike the 1964 Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Rex Harrison (repeating his Broadway triumph) and Audrey Hepburn, the show at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is handsome, even highly stylized. The costumes by Catherine Zuber are beautiful (especially in the scenes at the Embassy and the Ascot races), and the sets by Michael Yeargan, which move the action rapidly from scene to scene (particularly in Henry Higgins’ house on Wimpole Street), are a marvel of economy in stagecraft. 

But it is in fidelity to the book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and the music by Frederic Loewe that this show is best served. Over the past few decades, changing attitudes toward sexual roles, race and ethnicity have led a number of producers to embark on ill-advised “revisals,” in which playwrights are commissioned to perform drastic surgery on shows’ “books” (the spoken, non-sung portions, often called the “librettos”). 

More often than not, these changes, rather than enhancing the value of the songs that drew backers to the show in the first place, call unnecessary attention to themselves through their anachronistic interpretations.  

But director Bartlett Sher sidestepped that danger. He left the libretto, from what I could see, almost entirely intact. But, without changing a single word, he has changed the interpretation of its famous ending (“"Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?"). In his non-traditional way, he has adhered closer to Shaw’s original, almost perversely non-conformist spirit than any prior production.

The cast differed somewhat at this performance from the start of its run last April. Not having seen the show when it first settled in at Lincoln Center, I can’t say whether the replacements constituted an improvement, but the actors certainly filled their roles ably.

Michael Williams stepped in for Mark Aldrich as Lord Boxington, and, in a role with far greater visibility—and greater potential for triumph or disaster—Adam Grupper—the understudy for Norbert Leo Butz (Alfred P. Doolittle) and Allan Cordenur (Col. Pickering)—subbed capably for the latter.

Other cast changes were longer lasting. At this performance, Becca Ayers took on the multiple roles of Mrs. Hopkins, Henry Higgins’ maid, as well as understudy for Mrs. Parsee and an ensemble member. I would have loved to have seen Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, but how could I complain about my longtime stage favorite Rosemary Harris (perhaps best known as Aunt May in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman film trilogy) in the role?

The most significant cast change involved Laura Benanti, who took over the role of Eliza Doolittle from the acclaimed Lauren Ambrose. From having seen her in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s terrific revival of the musical She Loves Me (see my review here), I knew Ms. Benanti was a performer with considerable vocal prowess and acting range. 

True, in her late 30s, she is a full two decades older than the Cockney flower girl she’s portraying (as well as the actress who made her reputation in the original musical, Julie Andrews). She’s even a couple of years older than co-star Harry Hadden-Paton. 

But producers have found a way forever to make audiences forget about age-appropriate casting for Eliza. The first Eliza, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, was 49 years old when she originated the role in the original 1913 production of Pygmalion. Even on the big screen, where age is harder to disguise, Audrey Hepburn was 35 when she won the coveted role. It helps that musical-theater enthusiasts (especially opera fans) have long been asked to engage in far more startling suspensions of disbelief.

What this production has, in Ms. Benanti, is an artist with the maturity to understand and convey Eliza’s struggle for autonomy; of her pride in not simply passing for a “lady” but also learning a new language to help her do so; and of her fury in being bullied and dismissed not just by her no-account father but by the conniving bully like Higgins and even the seemingly thoughtful Col. Pickering.

In other words, this is more than a show where attention is more balanced than before between Eliza and Higgins; this is a production which, like never before, belongs to Eliza and the actress bringing her to life in the 21^st century. 

In its fall 2007 production of Pygmalion starring Jefferson Mays as Higgins and Claire Danes as Eliza, the Roundabout opened my eyes to what had long seemed preposterous: that a happily-ever-after ending for the professor and his pupil would not only have been a stretch, but even preposterous. 

The Lincoln Center production pushes that notion even further. Hadden-Paton’s Higgins could be an Edwardian counterpart to Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory: an intellectual man-child with nearly zero emotional intelligence—and, thus, a long-term indifference to how he might sound to others. This Higgins might be missing a good deal of the charm that Harrison brought to the role, but it does underscore that the professor’s emotional journey will take longer than Eliza’s.

More than a decade ago, I took special delight in the Tony Award-winning performance of Norbert Leo Butz in the Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But he may have exceeded that here as Alfred P. Doolittle. The actor (who has now turned the role over to the equally estimable Broadway veteran Danny Burstein) made of Eliza’s father a role to behold. Leading his bar mates in his two big numbers, “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” he is as irresponsible a scamp who ever lived. But you can’t help loving his brio—and chuckling on his predicament after an unexpected windfall leaves him sputtering about the dangers of “middle-class morality.”

With his majestic voice, Jordan Donica demonstrated with the big number given to the young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill, “On the Street Where You Live,” the great, beating unconditional love that has been missing from Eliza all this time under the thumb of her father and Higgins. Donica’s unabashed joy is enough to convince the audience that, with all his faults (as someone who’s never worked a day in his life, how can be expected to provide for her, let alone himself, if they marry?), he presents Eliza with a credible alternative to life with Higgins.

Sophisticated and hilarious, My Fair Lady continues to repay musical theater lovers’ attention. Even as Eliza delivers a curtain response to Higgins that leaves the linguistics professor uncharacteristically speechless, Benanti and Co. leave the audience walking on air.

Quote of the Day (Shannon Reed, Imagining a Modernized ‘My Fair Lady’)

“Eliza with a ‘Z’!”

“(Formerly “My Fair Lady”)

“In modern-day London, a feisty urban female youth turned doctoral candidate teaches her rich male capitalist mentor about the depth and the variety of language and expression, causing him to abandon his snobbish ideas about what it means to be ‘well-spoken.’ You’ll love hearing new takes on old favorites, including ‘I Could Have Analyzed Noam Chomsky All Night’; ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like Another Woman of Greater Achievement?’; and ‘In the Library Study Carrel Where You Work on Your Doctorate in Sociolinguistics.’”— Shannon Reed, “Shouts and Murmurs:Classic Musicals, Updated,” The New Yorker, Mar. 20, 2017

Flashback, October 1964: Witty, Wise ‘My Fair Lady’ Opens

My Fair Lady, that wittiest and wisest of movie musicals, opened at New York’s Criterion Theater this week 50 years ago, on its way to cleaning up at the box office and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Over the years, it has become something of a fashion for certain film buffs to bemoan the big-screen adaptation of the 1956 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Perhaps my favorite movie blogger, “Self-Styled Siren,” even includes it on a list of the 10 Worst Best Picture Oscar winners.

I have to part company with her (and the by-no-means-inconsiderable cohort she represents), though. Within a minute of watching the film, I’m smiling and laughing; days after watching it, one of its magnificent melodies still linger in my mind. In short, it fulfills what has to be one of the functions of a movie: it moves me, in the most direct (and, in this case, joyful) way.

Why does it succeed? I’ve boiled it down to these reasons:

*Its libretto. Even many of the best of the Golden Age of Musicals in Hollywood forced viewers to endure tissue-thin stories and characters for, say, a half-hour’s worth of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in all their glory. This was not a problem for any show based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), which furnished some of his most pungent reflections on class. Yet no less than Oscar Hammerstein II, generally regarded as the greatest librettist in Broadway history, had been unable to translate this into a musical, agreeing with partner Richard Rodgers that the cold intellect of Prof. Henry Higgins wouldn’t translate well into a musical. it took librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to use the same strategy for Broadway (and, later, film) gold that John Huston had used to create his version of The Maltese Falcon when three earlier versions had failed: i.e., use the dialogue that’s already there.

*Those songs—ingenious, funny, beautiful. “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “The Rain in Spain,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”, “Just You Wait,” “Why Can’t the English?”, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and my favorite, “The Street Where You Live.” I’ve run through only half the show’s titles, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’ve missed a great one. How much better can it get than this?

*Sure-handed direction. Critics often speak of the Best Director Oscar won by George Cukor for My Fair Lady as a consolation prize for the movies he should have won it for (e.g., David Copperfield, The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib). But this underestimates both the obstacles he faced and the style with which he brought the whole thing off. For all the money spent ($17 million—a record for a Warner Brothers musical up to that time), Cukor shot the film on time and economically, steering the massive project through a male star (Rex Harrison) who had almost destroyed the confidence of his leading lady (Julie Andrews) on Broadway; a current leading lady (Audrey Hepburn) annoyed that she wouldn’t be allowed to sing the songs she had trained months to do; a costume designer (Cecil Beaton) constantly bent on getting his way; and a studio head (Jack L. Warner) who kept bumptiously interfering with production. As a molder of acting talent, he may have had his own take on this retelling of the tale of Pygmalion: “Anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever,” he told friend Gavin Lambert. That, in a sense, becomes what Higgins does with Eliza.

*The bounteous production design.  Beaton’s costumes were indeed stunning—so much so that the crew burst into applause upon seeing Hepburn in Eliza’s costume for the ball for the first time. But art director Gene Allen influenced the stylized look of the movie even more so—notably through the Ascot sequence, in which trompe l'oeil sets convey how outsider Eliza might see the race and its onlookers.

*Rex Harrison. “Sexy Rexy” could be a royal SOB when not appearing before an audience, as I discussed in a post on the centennial of his birth. But his charm was such that he was one of the few actors who could have made it remotely possible that Eliza would not walk away forever from her bullying, insensitive teacher.

*Audrey Hepburn. Warner insisted that Andrews, who originated the role of Liza on Broadway, would not have the requisite box-office pull to help the film recoup its investment, so he offered the role to Hepburn. That turned out to be a mistake when Warner was forced to hire Marni Nixon to dub his star’s voice. The revelation of that resulted in one of the great snubs in Oscar history: though the film earned 12 nominations, Hepburn’s name was conspicuously missing. Yet this was deeply unfair to the actress: Academy Award voters, before and after, have nominated other performers who had their voices dubbed (Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams) and even presented statuettes to actors who were clearly lip-synching (Jamie Foxx in Ray, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose). Hepburn’s acting, dubbed vocals or not, was characteristically marvelous.

*Stanley Holloway. In one of the great might-have-beens in film history, James Cagney turned down the role of Eliza’s father, coalman Alfred P. Doolittle. The power of the actor in that supporting role might have been such that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Warner hadn’t been tempted to retitle the project Cockney Doodle Dandy. But, three years into retirement from the silver screen, Cagney was having too much fun painting to go before the cameras again—especially if it meant more work with Warner, who had subjected him to countless bruising contract suspensions while the actor was with the studio. That opened the door to Stanley Holloway, who got to repeat his show-stopping role as Mr. Doolittle on Broadway.

Even more than most films, My Fair Lady was filled with all kinds of drama. But one of the most astonishing tales associated with it came at its premiere. Warner was set to escort the daughter of CBS Chairman Bill Paley (who had sold him the rights to the musical) to the event. But when she became sick, he enlisted the services of a call girl working the bar at the hotel where he was staying. The story goes that, Higgins-like, he passed the working girl off as “Lady Cavendish.” The ploy worked.

That anecdote would, on the surface, sound too impossible to be believed. But Warner was a womanizer, and crass. Moreover, in Hollywood, it’s always best to keep in the back of the mind this proposition: No matter how preposterous a story is, there is an at least 80% chance that it it true.

This Day in Theater History (Birth of Suave, Sophisticated, Terrifying Rex Harrison)

March 5, 1908—The suave actor who played to perfection Henry Higgins and a host of other comic roles on stage and film, Rex Harrison, was born in Lancashire, England.

Not for nothing was one of Harrison’s films called The Rake’s Progress, for his ego and libido were extraordinary even by Hollywood’s expansive yardstick. Six wives put him in the same league with Henry VIII, and one of his many lovers, Carole Landis, killed herself when he refused to divorce his wife at the time, Lilli Palmer.

“Sexy Rexy,” they called him, when other four-letter words, not printable here, didn’t spring immediately to mind.

In pre-opening rehearsals for My Fair Lady, rather than try to bolster Julie Andrews’ confidence, Harrison seemed ready to consume the 20-year-old newcomer alive until director Moss Hart took her aside for intensive tough-love coaching sessions, according to Stephen Bach’s biography of Hart, Dazzler. (The accompanying photo shows the two stars in a —presumably—more comfortable moment onstage, after the dust settled.) 

Mark Harris’ new account of a pivotal year in Oscar history, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, reveals an even uglier aspect of this character trait, as a deep-in-his-cups Harrison repeatedly rained anti-Semitic taunts at his younger co-star, Anthony Newley, during production of Dr. Dolittle.

What made all this bearable—barely—were the actor’s easy facility with the most verbally challenging texts, along with a natural wit and charm that made him what Noel Coward called “the greatest interpreter of high comedy in the world.”

Over his long career, he not only took on Coward, Christopher Fry, W. Somerset Maugham, and Frederick Lonsdale, but also, preeminently, George Bernard Shaw. Besides Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, a musical adaptation of Pygmalion, Harrison appeared in Major Barbara on film, Caesar and Cleopatra on Broadway, and Heartbreak House on TV. (The cast in this latter version—including Harrison, Amy Irving, and Rosemary Harris—compared very favorably with the recent Roundabout Theatre production starring Swoosie Kurtz and Philip Bosco.) In fact, Harrison was almost as closely associated with Shaw as Jason Robards would come to be with Eugene O’Neill.

I’ve seen four different actors playing Professor Higgins: James Villiers, in a 1973 BBC production, in which he barely held his own against Lynn Redgrave’s Eliza Doolittle; Leslie Howard, upending his usual milquetoast image with his relentlessly focused Higgins in the 1938 adaptation of Pygmalion; Jefferson Mays, in last fall’s Roundabout production with Claire Danes, playing the language expert as the bullying conniver that Shaw had originally written; and Harrison himself. 

As fine as the other three actors were, only in Harrison’s case was the choice of a particular performer absolutely indispensable to the role.

To create a Professor Higgins who could—unlike Shaw’s play—actually fall in love with and keep Eliza, Lerner and Loewe needed someone who could not only intimidate a young girl, but take her heart away despite herself (or, in the delicious irony here, himself as well).

Harrison’s sophistication made him the only real choice for the role on Broadway, despite his lack of any real singing skill. (Lerner and Loewe had to simply accommodate their songs to the actor’s unique say-song style.)

Perhaps the only Hollywood actor who could have brought anything close to these qualities was Cary Grant, who amazingly, even after Harrison’s Broadway triumph, was offered the role on the big screen. To his credit, Grant not only said he wouldn’t accept it, but that he wouldn’t even watch the film if anyone other than Harrison were in that role.

It’s become a bit of a fashion among certain film musical theater aficionados to downgrade the 1964 musical. In my opinion, that view is deeply misplaced: the movie and the contribution of both director George Cukor and Harrison are at the highest level of craftsmanship.

Take a look at the 40th-anniversary DVD set. Focus on Harrison’s astonishingly cheerful discovery of Eliza, watching how he draws out the last syllable: “You’re so deliciously low.”

Better yet, examine the critical sequence involving Eliza’s agonized learning of vowels. The filmmakers wisely added this, not from normal text but from a suggested interpolation in Shaw’s published version. 

Repeatedly, Higgins goads and bullies Eliza until he stops and says something to the effect of, “When you learn it—and I know you will…” It’s the type of statement that an athletic coach will make, the kind of morale booster that plants the seed of confidence, and it binds athlete and coach together come what may—as it does here, in Harrison’s suddenly calm look of assurance. It gives credibility to Harrison as romantic leading man.

So, because we’re interested in every variety of the human species, let’s by all means recall the monstrous egomaniac who terrorized co-stars and the cad who pursued and heartlessly dumped more women than he could count. Thank God none of us had to live or work with him. 

(There’s a story that, after an outraged fan pummeled the actor with her rolled-up program for telling her to “Sod off” when she requested an autograph, his amused My Fair Lady co-star Stanley Holloway told him it was the first time in history that "the fan has hit the sh*t.")

But, as we watch his films, let’s also recall what Humphrey Bogart once said about actors and their private lives: “The only thing you owe the public is a good performance." Then, tip your hat (better yet, the My Fair Lady kind that Harrison adopted as his favorite headgear for the rest of his life after the show) to the actor who personified intelligence, sophistication and urbanity so effortlessly onscreen and onstage for more than six decades.