You can add to “Would The Taming of the Shrew still be staged were it not written by William Shakespeare?” the question, “Would My Fair Lady still be staged were it not for those timeless songs?” Such conjectures are but sophistry, but they do present a dilemma to a director and it’s always interesting to see how each new production deals with the issues the book throws up.
It’s 1912 and the Suffragettes are demanding the vote, the mores and fashions of a still new century are asserting themselves and the carnage of Flanders is not yet visible on the horizon. A phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, strikes a bet with his friend, another confirmed bachelor, Colonel Pickering, himself a student of the spoken word, that he can pass off the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, for a duchess after six months of vocal tutoring. Cue a little resistance, broken by a chocolate treat, Eliza consents - well you be the judge of that - and she sets off on a drilling in vowels. With a slip or two en route (you should hear them at Royal Ascot these days, Professor Higgins!) she does indeed go to the ball.
You can still see George Bernard Shaw’s socialism poking through the plot (his 1913 play, Pygmalion, is the source for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1956 Broadway musical) with the English obsession with how class is stamped by accent almost as pervasive and pernicious now, over a hundred years on. But we’re so conditioned to look for the hero of any story and Higgins is the only one we have and that’s a problem. He is, not just by the standards of today, but even by the standards of the 1950s, a complete shit.
Director, Joseph Pitcher, wisely, leans into those character flaws partly because the majority of the audience is expecting it and have made their peace and partly because to seek to ameliorate it would wash out key colours of the lead characters. There’s plenty of admonishment of Higgins’ treatment of Eliza from Pickering for us to nod along with, if we so wish. Critically, the casting of Nadim Naaman and Simbi Akande brings the two much closer in age than the 27 years that separated Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on the first West End run or the 21 years between Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in the celebrated movie.
Akande’s Eliza is clearly neither starving nor barely out of her teens and that adds some much needed agency to the character - she is simply too worldly, too charismatic and, when she fixes the audience with her eye, too intelligent to be a mere Barbie for these manipulating men. That allows all those appalling sentiments, unapologetically spouted by Higgins, to come off as foolish - you want to shout “Read the room for chrissake!” as he embarks on another round of denigration of Eliza as she stares at him. That said, it makes the burgeoning romance hard to credit, on her side at least, but Boris Johnson has never been short of female admirers, so…
The score comprises one monument of musical theatre after another and it’s a minor miracle that the cast and band can give full credit to their scale in so bijou a performance space. Diego Pitarch works wonders with the set and so too the multi-role cast, who get all manner of furniture on and off stage with minimal blackouts - many, many other productions could learn much from that! And as for Natalie Titchener’s costumes - so important an element in this show - well, they’re worth the admission on their own.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by Akande’s pre-transformation accent, but it’s far more important to be sure of her vowels post-transformation and she’s spot on at that point. She gives full value to “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” as does Naaman with “Why Can’t the English?” and the shocking “You Did It”. (Top) hats off too for Alfie Blackwell delivering the best song in the show in “On the Street Where You Live” in the underwritten part of the besotted milquetoast, Freddie Eynsford-Hill.
The big, carnivalesque numbers are led by Mark Moraghan (pictured above) as Eliza’s dissolute father, Alfred. Both “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time” have a real West End feel, the stage teeming with dancers and musicians, Alex Christian’s choreography necessarily very tight indeed! Scores seem all but impervious to dilution in smaller productions but dance and spectacle can often be compromised - not so here!
The faults of the show are too embedded to excavate and, if you accept that proposition, you will have a wonderful time at this unique venue. The great musicals probably exist outside of the specificities of time and space (after all, two of the most successful ever concern a hitherto unknown Argentine politician and a forgotten Founding Father) so one can be excused for just sitting back and enjoying it.
I granted myself that indulgence many years ago and the world’s a better place as a result.
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