Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (36 page)

The revival opened on Broadway on August 18, 1981. It was reviewed at the final preview performance, much to Garland’s alarm: he writes extensively about Harrison’s antagonistic attitude toward Ringham during the performance, causing her to underperform, and comments that the reviews “were
better than they deserved to be.”
⁵³
At the official opening night, however, Harrison “performed elegantly and beautifully” and Ringham “lifted her game, hit all the top notes with assurance, and performed with gusto and radiant charm.” In the
New York Times
, Mel Gussow’s review acknowledged that Ringham was clearly affected by the last-minute substitution, but absolutely raved about Harrison’s performance, describing him as “triumphant” and “the quintessential Higgins.” Gussow also had praise for the Mrs. Higgins of the ninety-three-year-old Cathleen Nesbitt, who returned to her original role and was “a graceful presence.” There was praise for the choreography, which had once more been reproduced by Crandall Diehl, and for Garland’s staging, though Oliver Smith’s reconceived designs were perceived to be “short of the original elegance.” The lighting and amplification also caused problems, yet overall Gussow’s article stated that the piece “endures as a paragon of wit, romance and musicality.”
⁵⁴

But the note of inhibition about Ringham’s performance, which according to Garland resulted from Harrison’s “ill-temper and unpleasantness,” was to limit the New York engagement to three months, “because the aura of the Eliza Doolittle was never really there.”
⁵⁵
It closed on November 29 after 124 performances, including a four-week extension. The director and producers had all hoped for more, but in the end, the lack of “an inspirational Eliza” was to unhinge the balance in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, and the show could go no farther, even with its legendary male lead.
⁵⁶

In 1993
Fair Lady
was booked to return to Broadway, and again it was to be the final destination in a U.S. tour. This time, though, the production was completely new. Attempts to cling to the original conception in all previous stagings were largely dismissed, with the only obvious connection found in the casting of Julian Holloway, Stanley’s son, as Doolittle. The troubles experienced in the 1981 revival were nothing compared to the fate that befell the 1993 staging, which was reported to have cost somewhere in the region of $2.5 million. The pre-Broadway tour began in Fort Meyers, Florida, and already problems had started to emerge. A week before the opening, Melissa Errico, who was due to play Eliza, ruptured a capillary in her right vocal cord, and her understudy, Meg Tolin, had not sung the part in rehearsals; Errico’s costumes did not fit Tolin, so replacements had to be hired locally. Ralph Koltai’s sets did not fit the theater and had to be quickly changed; the first performance was then hijacked by a stagehands’ strike, during which the actors managed
to improvise their way through the performance. Two days later, the sets were being loaded into a truck to move to Orlando, when Fort Meyers was hit by a tornado; some of the sets and costumes were seriously damaged. The
New York Times
catalogued these and many other problems in an article on July 2, suggesting that the direction, choreography, sets, and cast (which included Richard Chamberlain as Higgins) each had major weaknesses.
⁵⁷

Howard Davies’s production aimed for a radical interpretation of a well-loved show, which he implied had been treated with too much reverence in recent times. Fran Weissler, one of the producers, commented that “We asked for a new concept and supported one.”
⁵⁸
Davies’s reading darkened the story, so that Higgins’s library was now more reminiscent of a laboratory. A huge phrenological head and various pieces of apparatus dominated the set. Higgins’s engagement with Eliza was more physical than before; at one point he sat astride her, and at another he prized open her mouth like a dentist. The Belgian painter Magritte’s surrealistic work influenced certain aspects of the staging, especially the Ascot scene, in which some of the aristocrat spectators descended from the sky on swings and stood suspended in midair for the entire tableau. The “I Could Have Danced All Night” scene was set against a deep blue sky with only a window (hanging in midair) and a bed as scenery. On the other hand, Doolittle’s scenes were staged fairly conventionally.

On the whole, the critics admired Davies’s efforts to take a new look at the piece, but none of them found his view entirely successful. In the
New York Times
, for instance, David Richards said that the show wanted to be “a brave new
My Fair Lady
” but that it worked only “to a certain extent.”
⁵⁹
The production’s drawn-out problems had been insurmountable, and it was ultimately neither revisionist nor traditional. After opening on December 9, 1993, at the Virginia Theatre, it closed on May 1, 1994, with only 165 performances under its belt. Subsequently, the show has not been seen on Broadway, though it was performed in concert by the New York Philharmonic four times between March 7 and March 10, 2007, at Avery Fisher Hall. The cast included the TV star Kelsey Grammer and Kelli O’Hara, a Broadway favorite who went on to star in the acclaimed 2008 revival of
South Pacific
at the Lincoln Center Theater. But
My Fair Lady
has yet to receive a full-blown Broadway revival for the new millennium.

During the 1960s,
My Fair Lady
went on a two-year tour around the UK, just as it had done for nearly seven years in America. Two separate companies toured England, and everywhere it went it caused a stir. When the production
visited Birmingham in 1964, a flyer proclaimed: “Due to the tremendous reception given to this magnificent musical we are pleased to announce that its run must be
EXTENDED INTO
1965! The best in entertainment at the finest theatre in the Midlands.”
⁶⁰
It was described as “A lavish new £60,000 production” but was clearly based in every way on the London staging. In 1977, however, all that was to change when Sir Cameron Mackintosh scored one of his earliest successes with a completely new staging, which would “recapture the spirit of the original but with new visual designs and modern stage technology.”
⁶¹
The impetus for the staging was a grant from the British Arts Council that wanted to fund a big touring production, which would be a popular success in some UK regions, where many theaters were struggling to find material that would bring in audiences and keep the venues alive. Tim Goodchild created entirely new sets, and choreographer Gillian Lynne completely reinvented Hanya Holm’s dances.

In the cast was the British actor Tony Britton as Higgins, a part he had played on tour and on record; Liz Robertson, a young actress who had previously made an impression in Mackintosh’s
Side By Side By Sondheim
; and the veteran British actress Dame Anna Neagle as Mrs. Higgins. The production opened on November 9, 1978, in Leicester and visited key British cities (Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Nottingham, Newcastle, Oxford, and Cardiff) before coming to London the following year on October 25, 1979. By all accounts, Lerner himself had a significant impact on the production, in addition to the direction by Robin Midgley, and it was during this period that he met and fell in love with Liz Robertson, who became his wife and also went on to appear in his final completed musical,
Dance a Little Closer
(1983).
⁶²

The year 1992 saw a new touring
Fair Lady
in the UK that took a radically new look at the piece. Director Simon Callow enlisted the English fashion designer Jasper Conran to help him create a revisionist version, which placed the emphasis on the plight of the female protagonist. “
My Fair Lady
is about class, prejudice, feminism,” commented Conran at the time. “Eliza is the most important person and the whole point of it is how she emerges as a strong woman.”
⁶³
Conran and Callow went back to Shaw’s
Pygmalion
and explored Eliza’s trajectory as the focal point of the show. Conran also took inspiration from the Greek myth, and even went so far as to dress Eliza in the style of a marble statue in the ball scene, including a laurel wreath for her head. David Fielding’s set designs extended the idea of Eliza’s struggle by covering the floor and many of the backdrops with Higgins’s phonetic text, which in this version completely invaded her life. But although the performances by Edward Fox (Higgins) and Helen Hobson (Eliza) were praised in some quarters, neither their input nor the imagination of Callow’s concept was deemed
to be enough by the critics to outweigh the production’s problems, and it never transferred to London.
⁶⁴

Stanley Holloway (Doolittle) and Julie Andrews (Eliza) in the original Broadway production (Springer/Photofest)

The next major production of the show to be seen internationally once more stemmed from Cameron Mackintosh. In 2001 he supported a revival at London’s National Theatre, directed by Trevor Nunn. Higgins was played by Jonathan Pryce, the esteemed British actor of stage and screen, while Eliza went to a genuine Cockney actress, Martine McCutcheon, who was prominent
at the time for her appearance in the leading UK soap opera
EastEnders
. Although Nunn believed that Lerner had improved on Shaw, he added some lines from
Pygmalion
into the book of the
My Fair Lady
revival, making the already extensive text even longer.
⁶⁵
This sort of thing typified Nunn’s approach, which presented what seemed like a familiar version of the show but in truth changed it in various ways. William David Brohn’s orchestrations and Chris Walker’s dance arrangements revised certain aspects of the score, such as changing the thematic material in the overture (which was shortened) and adapting the “Little Bit of Luck” dance music to contain a percussive improvisatory section involving dustbin lids used for a tap dance in the manner of Gene Kelly in
It’s Always Fair Weather
, “conducted” by Doolittle using a wooden spoon. Nunn moved the interval back, so that Higgins’s and Eliza’s departure for the ball was the end of the first act. Another striking aspect was the emphasis on historical context: the Ascot scene was costumed (by Anthony Ward) with the ensemble dressed in mourning for the late King Edward VII, and the staging of “Show Me” concluded with Eliza emerging from the London Underground and joining a line of Suffragettes demanding votes for women.

In general, the reviews were positive about Nunn’s interpretation. Though Michael Billington in the
Guardian
complained that the piece itself “is a soft-centred betrayal of Shaw,”
⁶⁶
Rhoda Koenig in the
Independent
wrote that, on the contrary, it is an improvement.
⁶⁷
Having opened at the Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre on March 15, the production moved to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane—home to the original London production—on July 21. Unfortunately, the initial cast was dogged by the frequent absence of Martine McCutcheon due to illness, mirroring the problems experienced during the 1981 Broadway revival. During one week, Pryce acted opposite three different Elizas, because McCutcheon’s understudy also fell ill.
⁶⁸
She was later replaced by the West End actress Joanna Riding, who continued in the role of Eliza with Pryce; he was then succeeded by Alex Jennings as Higgins in May 2002. In March 2003, a new cast took over, with Anthony Andrews (Higgins), Laura Michelle Kelly (Eliza), Russ Abbot (Doolittle), Hannah Gordon (Mrs. Higgins), and Stephen Moore (Pickering) providing such a fresh ensemble performance as to cause Edward Seckerson to declare in the
Independent
that “this is the cast that should have opened the show.”
⁶⁹
Charles Spencer in the
Daily Telegraph
went so far as to describe it as “musical theatre at the very summit of its achievement.”
⁷⁰

The production then toured twelve cities in the UK from September 28, 2005, to August 12, 2006, again with a new cast, before launching a ten-month American tour in September 2007. The latter included two actresses as
Mrs. Higgins, both of whom had a strong connection to the show: first, Sally Ann Howes, who took over from Julie Andrews in the original Broadway production, and later Marni Nixon, who dubbed Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice in the film version. Yet again, in spite of the idiosyncratic features of Nunn’s production, nostalgia took over, and the staging took its place alongside all three Broadway revivals in retaining a connection to the original production in its casting.