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 (Rosemary Harris, on an Irresistible Pass From the Past)

“He said, ‘Don’t you think we should get together to celebrate our glorious futures before they become our dim and dismal pasts?’ How could any girl resist that?”—British actress Rosemary Harris, recalling the pickup line used by Labour Party force Tony Crosland to introduce himself after the two had been praised in London’s Evening Standard, quoted in Ian Parker, “The Boards: Raj Recall,” The New Yorker, Oct. 20, 2014

Theater Review: Fall Roundup at NY’s Roundabout

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Putting together a schedule for a theatrical season can be murderously difficult. Just look at the Roundabout Theatre Co. Without a standing repertory company, it must reinvent itself with virtually every production. Getting the right actors when they’re available is a crapshoot. And, while every company with any kind of ambition wants bragging rights to developing and mounting a successful new play, what do you do when audiences don’t cotton to it? 

Even when you go for what seems the tried and true, things have a way of blowing up in your face.

Which brings me to the Roundabout’s fall season. I had no real desire to see Cabaret again after the landmark 1998 revival starring Natasha Richardson—the prospect of seeing Alan Cumming, in his star-making turn as the MC, held no real interest for me. My fear—that this production would not differ much from that earlier show—proved correct. The one hope I had—Emma Stone as Sally Bowles—proved premature, as the film star was only able to take over a role originally meant for her until well after Michelle Williams had given it a try.

The other offerings have been a mixed bag, too. With a top-notch cast working with a virtually foolproof script, You Can’t Take It With You would, in a more just world, go on indefinitely at the Longacre Theatre. But, with audiences at only 58.91% of capacity, it placed among a group of underachieving box-office “underdogs” for the week just before Thanksgiving. At this point, it is set to close February 22, but don’t be surprised if it’s gone sooner.

There are a couple of excellent reasons why this uproarious screwball farce won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1936, and why it still brings down the house with laughter in its current revival. First, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were not just playwrights, but also directors who knew how to juice up a work that might have unaccountably gone flagging, resulting in a comedy as durably constructed as that other marvel of 1930s engineering, the Hoover Dam. Second, the rise of multiple media channels has only whetted Americans’ interest in grand eccentrics like this play’s Sycamore family and those who come into their orbit. Third, nearly 80 years after its premiere, in another age of economic unease at home and storm clouds abroad, the comedy still proves a tonic for the lowest of spirits.

James Earl Jones, in an unexpected comic turn, is first among equals here as Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, a businessman who stopped going to the office years ago—and stopped paying income taxes, too. Perhaps the next best-known cast member, Rose Byrne, had the unenviable task of playing the ingénue, Alice Sycamore—the only normal member of her household. (Since I saw the play, Ms. Byrne was succeeded in the role by Anna Chlumsky.)

Alice dreads the idea of her prospective in-laws, the Kirbys (the father owns the factory where she works), visiting the family she loves. You would, too, if you had a father whose basement experiments involve rockets operating only by chance; a mother who started a novel because a typewriter was delivered to the house by mistake; a sister of nonexistent dancing skill who continues to perform jettes around the house; and two Russian emigres—a dance instructor and a former grand duchess-turned-Manhattan waitress—with astonishingly demonstrative personalities.

Although, in terms of lines, a number of parts in the play would normally be deemed small, they are so outsized in eccentricity that the supporting actors have their moments to shine just as much as Jones. Particularly outstanding are Elizabeth Ashley as the grand duchess, Annaleigh Ashford as Essie the would-be ballerina, Reg Rogers as her hilarious dance teacher Boris, and Kristine Nielsen (as fine here as in Christopher Durang’s contemporary Chekhov reimagining Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) as “playwright” mom Penny Sycamore.

A curious thing happened in the fall with the two Tom Stoppard plays produced by the Roundabout. In its cast size (15 actors) and its widely varying settings (1930s India and 1980s India and England), Indian Ink would normally fit best into the company’s flagship venue, the 740-seat American Airlines Theatre.

But that space was reserved for what is probably the most popular (and accessible) work of the English playwright’s career, The Real Thing, even though the latter calls for fewer actors, smaller production demands and less ambition. So Indian Ink (which closed in early December) was staged in the 424-seat Laura Pels Theatre, where the Roundabout tends to put on its smaller, more experimental fare.

What you had, then, was the type of canvass used to explore Anglo-Indian relations by novelists E.M. Forster (A Passage to India) and Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet), except that, through the teeming intellectual ambitions of Stoppard, this drama takes in even more than that. It shouldn’t cohere. The fact that it does owes less to Stoppard’s usual theater of ideas, and more to the tactile hold on the imagination that India continues to exert on him, 70 years after he lived there briefly as a child.

Rosemary Harris, whom I’ve been lucky enough to see onstage (in the Roundabout’s 2002 production of Edward Albee’s All Over) and on film (Spider-Man 1, 2 and 3 and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) is her typically wondrous self as Eleanor Swan, gingerly trying to enhance her beloved older sister’s critical reputation decades after her death, even as she navigates the tricky access demands of biographers.

But the real discovery here, at least for many U.S. playgoers who might only know her for her appearance in the film Atonement, was Romola Garia as Eleanor’s sister, the (fictional) bohemian poet Flora Crewe. She was absolutely fearless in playing this desperately ill woman who, in 1930s India, burns with desire to experience what may well be the last stop on her life’s journey. She was particularly impressive in her scenes with Firdous Bamji (playing Indian painter Nirad Das), switching from imperious, aloof—and, in her urging to penetrate to the truth of what Das sees, challenging and encouraging.

The Real Thing, which closed a week ago, came into New York with high expectations, because of its two prior New York productions (including the 1984 original directed by Mike Nichols) and its top-flight cast. Critics were not generally kind to the show, perhaps because the results couldn’t match the importance this play has taken on as perhaps the centerpiece of Stoppard’s long, much-honored career.

I was inclined to see this carping as misplaced. The most intriguing bit of casting was Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon (a Roundabout board member, and star of such previous shows as Distracted and The Women), who had played the teenage daughter of playwright Henry in the original show. This time, she fit the bill as Henry’s first, acerbic wife, Charlotte, an actress appearing in his current play. Maggie Gyllenhaal, employing a not-always-convincing British accent in her Broadway debut, came off less well as Annie, the friend with whom he has an affair, then marries.

The role of Henry, a playwright of flashing wit and intelligence, with a deep, abiding interest in popular music such as The Crystals’ 1963 pop hit “Da Doo Ron Ron,” bears more than a little resemblance to Stoppard. Ewan McGregor captured Henry’s darting verbal dexterity (particularly in the play’s famous long “cricket bat” speech, likening good writing to a bit well hit) well enough. But Henry’s’s jealousy and anguish in the second act, when he suspects Annie of committing adultery again, eluded his grasp.

Quote of the Day (“The Lion in Winter,” on “How Peace Begins”)

Prince John: “A knife! He's got a knife!”
Eleanor of Aquitaine: “Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.”--James Goldman, The Lion in Winter (1966)

Yes, that’s Katharine Hepburn in the accompanying image as Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the role that netted her a second Oscar trophy. But two years before it became a vehicle for her, on this date in 1966, The Lion in Winter premiered at Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre, with an actress two decades the junior of Kate the Great--the luminous Rosemary Harris--as the estranged spouse of King Henry II of England. (Robert Preston played the latter role onstage; Peter O’Toole would handle it onscreen, repeating the role that had earned him a nomination four years previously in Becket.)

I was fortunate enough to see Harris onstage in Edward Albee’s All Fall Down several years ago, in a production presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co. That same troupe mounted, in the winter of 1999, a revival of The Lion in Winter starring Stockard Channing and Laurence Fishburne.

Both the play and film (adapted by Goldman himself) feature a war of wills, wit and words between Eleanor and Henry, who has decided to let his wife out of prison for the Christmas season as he ponders an heir to the throne among their children. As the quote above indicates, there’s much in the script that actors would virtually kill for.

But even actors of enormous skill can’t hide the fact that this otherwise literate script is more than a little anachronistic. As the sons of Henry and Eleanor scheme against each other and their father for the throne, the tone becomes more than a little like one of those 20th-century Thanksgiving and Christmas family get-togethers. You know--the kind that usually climaxes with, “Mom (or Dad) always loved you best!”