You might be surprised that I spent this Saturday afternoon at a matinee at the National Theatre, D.C., of My Fair Lady. The show was playing here for a few days on a national road tour of the Bartlett Sher production that played originally at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, in Lincoln Center, New York City.
Sher has directed quite a few successful shows. Among those I've seen in New York were his revival, the first, of South Pacific, and the Aaron Sorkin adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird. Also directed by Sher were revivals of The King an I and Fiddler on the Roof, as well as the Broadway production of the drama Oslo. He's also directed some opera--Tales of Hoffmann and Le Comte Ory--at the Met in New York, as well as film of Rigoletto.
My experience with My Fair Lady includes seeing the movie, excellent except for the well-known Hollywood misstep of using Audrey Hepburn, whose singing had to be dubbed by someone who could sing, instead of Julie Andrews, whose career took off when she first sang Wouldn't It Be Loverly in the original My Fair Lady Broadway production in 1955. I hadn't seen the show on stage for ages, however, and what makes it different from other shows for me is that I remember each and every lyric from my listening to the LP about a zillion times.
There's a well-known story about Rex Harrison trying to turn down the offer to play Henry Higgins by telling Moss Hart, the director, that he didn't sing. Hart, who had worked with Kurt Weill (Lady in the Dark) and knew all about the sprechsang (speak sung) in Weill's The Threepenny Opera and other works, had Lerner & Loewe pen a bunch of great songs that Harrison could supposedly just speak--heck, he and everyone else who's played the role did sing a little.
For me, Loewe's Viennese lilt carries the show from wonder to wonder in a terrific score. Loewe was an unassuming man whom I was luck enough to meet at the Lambs, where my dad belonged, and where Loewe met Lerner in 1942. The meeting resulted in Paint Your Wagon, Brigadoon, and after My Fair Lady, there were Camelot and Gigi (the latter a movie). Loewe retired after that, happy with a wonderful career on Broadway, and lived to be 88; Lerner married many times, went on to write more shows, including On A Clear Day You Can See Forever with Burton Lane, composer of Finian's Rainbow.
This time, I truly enjoyed listening carefully to Lerner's lyrics, which I knew before they were sung. They are clever and enjoyable, and often are in a class with the greats: Larry Hart, Cole Porter, and Ira Gershwin. Other things I thought about for the first time: the character of Alfred P. Doolittle, who gets the two great songs--With a Little Bit of Luck and Get Me to the Church on Time--is pure Shaw, especially his lines criticizing middle-class morality.
Shaw, by the way, was in no hurry to let anyone put music to his Pygmalion. He did select Lerner & Loewe, however, over Rodgers & Hammerstein and others who had been trying to win his favor. Stanley Holloway, the original in the part, was inimitable, but Michael Hegarty, our Alfie, was excellent, especially in the lengthy Get Me to the Church production number. By the way, a fine performer, Norbert Leo Butz, played the part in Sher's original Lincoln Center revival, now on tour of which this run in D.C. is a stop. I saw Butz here some years ago at the Warner Theatre as the M.C. in Cabaret, in which he also excelled.
I was worried about Madeleine Powell, the Eliza, because Wouldn't It Be Loverly didn't take off for me a la Julie Andrews. But Ms. Powell showed that she had real pipes when she pulled off high notes in several songs, finishing with a great soprano flash in Without You right near the finale. Jonathan Grunert was a very good Henry Higgins, essaying a role Harrison made his own on Broadway and in the movie. John Adkison was a fine Col. Pickering, a part perfectly played in the original by Robert Coote and then equally well presented by Wilfred Hyde-White in the movie.
My Fair Lady is a long show--3 1/2 hours by my measure. Back in 1955, it followed the traditional route to Philadelphia and, I believe, New Haven, respectively the month-long and week-long fine tuning stops. It was probably the great Moss Hart's finest production and the one for which I suspect he got the least credit because the show seemed to play all by itself--never the truth however much it sounds right.
I looked up the Lincoln Center cast and was delighted to see that it featured the fabulous Diana Rigg, Mrs. Peel of the original Avengers, in the marvelous small role of Mrs. Higgins. Daniel James Canady was our Zoltan Karpathy, and for me, he couldn't have the impact that the virtuoso Theodore Bikel had in the movie.
All in all, I just had a wonderful time immersed in My Fair Lady for the afternoon. I rank it with South Pacific, which I saw at the Lincoln Center revival, directed as mentioned by Sher, for having a perfect score, no clinkers. (Phil Silvers once did a fantastic bit about an actor who wanted the sing "Captain Andy" (playing Captain Andy) which probably was the only dud song in Showboat and is now usually cut from the already long show.)
So what was my favorite song? It was, is, and always will be Show Me. When The Lambs held a gala evening celebrating Lerner and Loewe, Show Me was the song all the theatrical pros in the ballroom demanded Julie Andrews sing. It just has everything a song in a musical should have.
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