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'My Fair Lady' at Academy: Just an ordinary revival
Let's forgive My Fair Lady its various trespasses for the moment. The musical, currently touring the United States in a boldfaced revival by England's Cameron Mackintosh/National Theatre (directed by Trevor Nunn! choreographed by Matthew Bourne! designed by Anthony Ward!), might be unbearably sexist, obliviously homoerotic and gleefully snobbish, but if you can resist Lerner and Loewe's glorious songs you just ain't 'uman, you ain't.
So yes, the music here is loverly, which one would expect from a top-shelf Brit production, as are the acting, dancing, costumes and set. Everything and everyone is technically proficient. But it's all a bit creepy, really, this body-snatchers version of a musical about human passions that exhibits surprisingly little passion itself.
Lisa O'Hare's cockney sweetheart Eliza Dolittle and Christopher Cazenove's bullying Professor Henry Higgins declaim at each other more than they connect. She sings that she could have danced all night, and he reflects that he's become accustomed to her face, but the songs seem separate from the action, rather than organic bursts of emotion sprouting from the loamy soil of their mutual frustrations and vulnerabilities.
Even Walter Charles' Colonel Pickering, a "confirmed bachelor" with a winking affinity for dressmakers, is denied the chance to fully commit to this irresistibly campy character trait, as Higgins asks "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" If you can't go there in a 2008 revival with Bourne - he of the all-male Swan Lake - involved, why bother at all?
Thankfully, Tim Jerome as Eliza's free-spirited, hard-drinking father, Alfred Dolittle, breathes the oxygen from London's foul-smelling streets into a production that relies too much on maintaining its aristocracy's rarefied air. He's messy, with a gravelly voice that's occasionally too rough, but he's sure enjoying himself, and while he's onstage, so are we.
Some of the show's troubles may be due to Ward's aloof set design, which relies on neutrals and cold colors, and creates no intimate spaces. Even Higgins' library has an open roof with the skies peering in.
Ward's costumes, though inventive, are also oddly detached, most obviously in the Ascot scene, where the women's dresses are almost a photo negative of those from George Cukor's 1965 film, with somber blacks and grays replacing Cecil Beaton's crisp blacks and whites.
Those who, out of nostalgia or affection, are happy to enjoy My Fair Lady's hit parade without worrying about all the extra aesthetic baggage will surely leave fulfilled. But those who - like Eliza - seek a deeper connection, will wonder what might have 'appened to its bloomin' 'eart.
