British director Howard Davies has a grittier take than usual on this masterpiece, with its book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and score by Frederick Loewe. Davies had staged a successful London production of Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” on which “My Fair Lady” is based. Shaw was a socialist, a despiser of the class system, and there’s a lot of this Shaw in Davies’s version. The relationship between Henry Higgins, the phonetics professor, and Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl he decides to make into a lady, is class warfare that mutates into romance. Davies goes heavy on the war and light on the romance.
A mad-scientist atmosphere invests Higgins’s laboratory, with its glub-glubbing machinery and giant illuminated phrenological head that’s like a symbol of some Edwardian Big Brother. Higgins sees Eliza as so much lumpen protoplasm to be remade into an upper-class facsimile. Chamberlain’s Higgins is colder, fiercer, scarier than Harrison’s. It’s an interesting nuance, and it lends a more primal tension to the relationship between this Mayfair Frankenstein and his reluctant creation.
Primal schmimal, what about the music, the romance, the fairladyness of it all? Chamberlain handles his speak-singing with a nice cadence, raining-in-Spaining exultantly with Errico. He exhibits a reluctant poignance in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” his ex post facto love song after Eliza has stormed out on him. The tall, vivid-faced Errico is a young performer with a lot to learn but already a lot to give. Her voice has a romantic bloom which sets a full sail on “I Could Have Danced All Night.” She sings this in her nightdress while doing ecstatic flip-flops in bed–the best choreography in the show, credited to Donald Saddler. As Colonel Pickering, the Watson to Higgins’s Holmes, Paxton Whitehead is the most pukka of sahibs.
Socialist Shaw would have chuckled in his beard at Davies’s staging of the famous Ascot racetrack scene: among the uppercrust spectators are some hoisted high over the stage. It’s a Magritte image, and although that surrealist master has long been turned into an advertising cliche, here the effect nicely projects the idea of these toplofty tofs who look down on everything. But Davies turns out to be only semi-tough. In a finale set up for the deserted Higgins to mourn the loss of the spunky Eliza, here she returns and rumples his hair in a kissy-poo ending. It’s just a bit too loverly.
