There are a handful of old plays and musicals that many feminists detest, including Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and Lerner and Loewe’s musical “My Fair Lady,” in which female characters return to misogynistic men who treat them abominably. In these more enlightened times, the director’s challenge is to find a balance between the original script and contemporary social mores.
Director Bartlett Sher manages the juggling act exceptionally well in his well-staged and beautifully sung Tony-nominated Lincoln Center Theater production, which is playing through Sunday at the San Diego Civic Theatre.
Under Sher’s direction, the new production sticks closer to its source material — George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play about England’s rigid social class snobbery — than the more romanticized versions seen in subsequent film and stage adaptations.
In Sher’s “My Fair Lady,” cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle isn’t a cartoonish, helpless “guttersnipe” whose howls and wails are played for laughs as she’s subjected to relentlessly demeaning treatment and insults by phonetician Henry Higgins.
Shereen Ahmed’s Eliza is less extreme, with gentler and more natural line delivery, and a greater sense of agency. When she’s stripped by Higgins’ servants to be showered, her fear is palpable. And when she snaps emotionally and delivers the revenge song “Just You Wait,” she charges unrelentingly through Higgins’ home — a dazzling, four-sided, two-story turntable set — without ever stopping, as the set spins quickly to keep up with her pace.
A scene from the national touring production of “My Fair Lady,” which arrives Nov. 30 at the San Diego Civic Theatre.
(Joan Marcus)
By contrast, Laird Mackintosh’s Higgins is the show’s most outlandish personality. He plays this spoiled man-child perfectly, but delivers his withering comments to Eliza in a way that feels more oblivious than intentionally hateful. Mackintosh also turns repeatedly to the audience to deliver Higgins’ lines about language and social class, further clarifying the relationship between tutor and student.
Meanwhile, in the background of their story, London suffragists march for women’s right to vote and another poor flower girl passes her days reading a book, showing other ways women were empowering themselves in early 20th-century England.
The physical production is gorgeous, with lavish, forced perspective scenery by Michael Yeargan, stunning period costumes by Catherine Zuber and nifty sound design by Marc Salzberg, where the hoofbeats of the horses running at the Ascot races migrate from one side of the Civic Theatre auditorium to the others using multiple speaker effects.
Always the biggest question in new stagings of “My Fair Lady” is whether a director will reunite Higgins and Eliza in the end. Sher makes a choice that I won’t divulge, but it’s one I have never seen, and it may have audience members drawing their own conclusions for the story.
“My Fair Lady”
When: 7:30 p.m. today. 7:30 p.m. Friday. 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., San Diego.
Tickets: $35.50 and up
Online: broadwaysd.com
COVID protocol: Proof of full vaccination required or negative COVID-19 PCR test within 72 hours of showtime or rapid antigen test performed by a medical professional within 12 hours of showtime. Masks required indoors.
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December 03, 2021 at 01:34AM
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Review: In lavish tour production, dazzling 'My Fair Lady' mixes tradition with fresh ideas, surprises - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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