Deborah Hay and Benedict Campbell in The Shaw Festival’s production of My Fair Lady
One of the biggest crowd-pleasers at this year’s Shaw Festival is surely My Fair Lady, a good but still disappointing production of the brilliant musical about a cockney flower girl who goes from rags to riches simply by learning to speak proper English. The flower girl is Eliza Doolittle (Deborah Hay) and she has a chance encounter with a coarse phonetics expert, Henry Higgins (Benedict Campbell). Higgins claims that in six months, he can teach her to speak like a lady, and in so doing, completely change her prospects in life. The play unfolds in two parts: the time and lessons leading up to Eliza’s perfection of the English language and the aftermath of how changing how she talks has profound effects on her situation in life.
My Fair Lady is one of the best, and also one of my favourite, musicals of the twentieth century. It combines an excellent story and a witty script – an abridged but verbatim adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion – with catchy, enduring tunes and great lyrics. In short, it has it all. That’s why it’s so incredibly difficult to get right. West Side Story is similar, requiring its cast to not only act but sing very difficult songs and dance, to boot, with most productions failing at one of these.
My Fair Lady has the added complication that it’s a story about transformations in character and life brought about by transformations in speech, which requires that all of its characters speak with very specific English accents. Eliza Doolittle is especially challenging to play: she starts the play with a rough cockney accent and finishes it a new woman with a refined upper-class accent,. There are many things to get right, and when a production does, it soars. But it’s also very easy to get them wrong.
This production of My Fair Lady gets things about half right, which is enough to keep the show fairly entertaining. This is the most ambitious choreography in a production of My Fair Lady that I’ve ever seen: the choreography for “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”, in particular, was inspired. It’s also the only time I’ve ever heard the vocals for Henry Higgins songs done completely in tune and in song – the film version with Rex Harrison involved mostly speak-singing and almost no actual singing – and Benedict Campbell as Henry can really sing.
There are two major problems with the production. The first is that the accents are generally uneven. Hay’s early accent is certainly vulgar but not quite cockney and her later accent isn’t quite right either. Campbell’s accent is certainly refined but it slips now and then. I’m not convinced it’s the actors’ fault because the accents seem to be wrong, across the board, in the exact same ways. When they all go to the Ascot, the brilliant and hilarious “Ascot Gavotte” number is mispronounced by the whole cast, with a very grating “ehscot”, which suggests they were all very badly coached on how precisely to speak.
The stars, Deborah Hay and Benedict Campbell, give solid performances with uneven accents. Hay’s physicalization is commendable: in the beginning her loose manner is boorish and crass and by the second half, become noticeably refined and delicate. Campbell mostly keeps up. I should warn that I recently saw a production of Pygmalion in the London West End starring Rupert Everett as Higgins. Everett’s portrayal was so rich, so complex, offbeat yet charismatic, that Campbell can’t possibly compete. The accents in the London production were also pitch perfect and incredibly detailed: as Eliza developed the ability to speak more properly, you could still hear minor slips into a cockney accent, every tenth word or so, which became increasingly less prevalent as the play went on. The trouble with Hay and Campbell – and the rest of the cast’s mediocre accents – is that they were distracting. I ended up focusing on how they sounded off instead of on the story. In the case of Pickering (Patrick Galligan), it was horribly grating.
The real star of the show proved to be Mark Uhre as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Eliza’s silly upper-class lover, who sings the silly but romantic love song, “On the Street Where You Live”. Freddy can so easily be an overlooked character: he is supposed to be daft yet sympathetic but can easily be banal. But Uhre has great stage presence. His Freddy is appealing and charming and completely steals the scene whenever he appears, even when the centre of attention is meant to be Eliza, like in the number “Show Me”. He’s also got a fantastic voice and a real affinity for the physicalizing Freddy’s proper manners and reckless romanticism. Mark Uhre is the real thing and he’s sure to be a star. Special mention should also be made of Sharry Flett as Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins, who nailed her part, balancing her maternal instincts, her disapproval of her son, and her pride in Eliza for Eliza’s transformation.
The second main problem was the set design, which though elaborate, was mostly ill conceived, leading to awkward movement on the stage. The set for Henry’s house provided two main spaces on the set: his desk and office on one side of the stage and a sitting room completely on the other end. These spaces were so disparate that when characters interacted between them – and they often did – the action was always stilted. It often seemed as though the characters were yelling at each other from opposite ends of the stage. Even worse, the characters would often move between the two sets, pacing back and forth, with absolutely no motivation, just looking for an excuse to use the stage. This, too, was distracting.
The set for covent garden at the beginning of the play was not quite as problematic. It impressively created distorted pillars to use perspective to make the stage look bigger. The problem was that most of the elements that broke up the stage – the pillars, the elevated platform – were so far upstage that it was awkward to have actors realistically move from downstage to upstage often, just to make use of the set pieces. The pillars need to serve as a hiding place for Higgins to observe Eliza and as barriers between the two when they spar. Instead, they serve as decoration which the director desperately attempts to use without elegance.
There was one clear exception to the poor set design: the set at the ascot was brilliant. I particularly liked how when the group of spectators prepares to watch the race, a fence rolls out in front of them, far downstage, and shadows of the horses racing flicker across the stage. It looks just right and feels just right and you get the real sense that they really are at the ascot. The ‘Ascot Gavotte’, which is perhaps the funniest of all the songs, because of its irony, is also done just right. Few things are funnier than watching the very composed, expressionless faces of the men and women at the ascot as they sing about how they “have never been so keyed up”.
Even with bad accents and bad staging, My Fair Lady is so well crafted that the production is still entertaining. It might lose a few genuine laughs and some of the complexity and believability of character development, but it can still fall back on a long list of fabulous songs. And so if all My Fair Lady can boast is some great song and dance numbers that will keep you tapping your feet, smiling, and humming the songs as you leave, it’s still well worth the ticket price. I was disappointed that the production wasn’t better and didn’t fully do justice to the musical, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.
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My Fair Lady runs until October 31.
For information on getting cheap tickets and trave,l see the post on BlogUT’s top 5 summer theatre festivals on a student budget.
Pinoy Sunday is a movie about a red couch. More specifically, it’s a movie about Manuel and Dado, two Filipino migrant factory workers in Taiwan, who dream of luxury and better days, and discover a discarded red couch on a Sunday, their day off. They decide to carry the couch back to the dormitory where they live so that one day they might be able to relax under the stars, drinking beer, stretched out on their couch, after a hard day’s work.
