Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies), McHugh, Dominic [fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

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