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music by Frederick Loewe, book & lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Tim Carroll & Kimberley Rampersad

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 25-December 22, 2024

Higgins: “I prefer a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition / Than to ever let a woman in my life”

The Shaw Festival first presented the classic musical My Fair Lady in 2011. For anyone who saw that production directed by Molly Smith, the present production co-directed by Tim Carroll and Kimberley Rampersad will be a disappointment. Musically, the performances are excellent and the choreography by Rampersad is tasteful if not especially exciting. The troubling aspect is that, as in so many pieces directed by Tim Carroll, the actors seem to have been left to their own devices to create their characters. The sound seems to have been cranked up in an attempt to give the music more impact. The result, in complete contrast to the Shaw production of 2011, is a musical that looks very pretty but is not involving.

As I noted in my 2011 review, “Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) presents a challenge to every potential director. Lerner’s ‘happy ending’ where Eliza comes back to the misogynist Professor Higgins may have suited the conservative 1950s but contradicts Shaw’s ending where the student comes to realize she has surpassed her teacher and leaves him. To make Lerner’s ending work, a director has to conceive of the couple rather like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick and show us how they fall in love despite their constant arguing and professions to the contrary”.

Carroll and Rampersad (whom I will henceforth refer to as “C&R”), make some small attempts to undercut Higgins’s rampant misogynist rants, but they do not follow through with it in the detailed way Smith did nor do they chart the stages of Eliza and Higgins’s love. Like Smith, C&R use “The Rain in Spain” as the point where Higgins realizes that he is attracted to Eliza. But they do not underline this point forcefully enough. When Eliza sings “I Could Have Danced All Night”, we ought to know she is referring to dancing with Higgins. Here, we wonder why she’s singing about the Embassy Ball that hasn’t happened yet.

C&R try to make Higgins look foolish when he sings the ridiculously pro-masculine song “A Hymn to Him” (i.e., “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”) by having Higgins tie his tie incorrectly and put his suit coat on backwards. But having Mrs. Pearce, Higgins’s housekeeper, but his coat on right, only shows that men need women if only as servants. As for Higgins’s other anti-female song “I’m An Ordinary Man” (viz. “Let a woman in your life / And you invite eternal strife”), C&R do nothing to undercut Higgins’s offensive pronouncements.

In the 2011 production, Smith was able to make the intransigent text show step by step how two people like Eliza and Higgins, who profess to hate each other, are actually falling in love. Smith had the process start with Eliza’s arrival at Higgins’s home. C&R do nothing of the sort. Except for Higgins’s delight at Eliza’s mastering of “The Rain In Spain”, they allow Tom Rooney to play Higgins’s as a nasty, unlikeable person, whom Eliza would be well rid of. Eliza’s return to Higgins at the end thus makes even less sense than it normally does. C&R use one good trick to temper the terrible final line of the musical – “Where the devil are my slippers?” In C&R’s version, Higgins knows where his slippers are because he has only just set them down in front of him. When he asks his question, both he and Eliza begin to lunge for them when the curtain falls. Thus, Higgins is now only at being his old bullying self. The problem is that C&R have done nothing to build up to this change in Higgins’s character just as they have done nothing to build up the change in Eliza’s.

In classic music theatre of any kind where the plot does not make sense, one usually has the compensation of the music itself. That certainly ought to be true of My Fair Lady which has one of the best scores of any American musical. Yet, C&R have allowed the sound designer, the normally reliable John Lott, to change the sound of the musical in disturbing ways. Lott has electronically modified and enhanced the sound from the orchestra so radically that it sounds completely artificial. He has used some sort of chorus filter in amplifying the instruments so that it sounds like there are 150 players in the pit rather than only 15. Lott has also used a reverb on the instruments and added a sheen so that the orchestral accompaniment sounds as if it were pre-recorded in a studio in the 1960s. We see conductor Paul Sportelli in the pit waving his arms and cueing the singers, but Lott’s manipulations has had the detrimental effect of making the orchestral music not sound live at all, the opposite of what one hopes for in a life performance.

This is bad enough, but Lott has also placed the overall sound level too high and has allowed the accompaniment to come close to drowning out the singing. This is a real pity because the music is otherwise so well sung.

Contending with insufficient direction and overmanipulated amplification, the cast fends for itself and does the best it can. I’ve seen Kristi Frank numerous times in her previous 11 seasons at the Shaw Festival. Playing Eliza Doolittle, her singing has never been better. Frequently she sounds as if she is channelling Julie Andrews, especially in “I Could Have Danced All Night”, so precise is her diction and so full and rounded her singing voice. In terms of acting, Frank is certainly one of the most serious Elizas I’ve seen. What’s missing, likely due to the lack of direction, is a sense of playfulness and fun. It is Eliza’s playfulness that could help link her to the emotionally immature Higgins and make it seem that the two do really have something in common.

Tom Rooney is the most unlikeable Higgins I’ve ever seen. Rooney makes Higgins so waspish, petty and tyrannical that Higgins’s vile misogyny and class prejudice doesn’t come off as foolish bluster, as other actors have made it see, but as firmly held beliefs. On the plus side, Rooney sings the role rather than using Rex Harrison’s technique of speaking to music. On the minus side, Rooney shows us no increase of affection in Higgins for Eliza as the action progresses. He even manages to sing Higgins’s one song about his feelings for Eliza, “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face”, not as an oblique confession of love, but as if it were merely about his feeling of being used to having Eliza around him.

At the performance I attended André Morin replaced David Alan Anderson as Colonel Pickering. Morin did a fine job at portraying Higgins’s sidekick as a force of moderation against Higgins’s harshness. Morin also sings, unlike most of the actor who play that role, so that in his one number “You Did It”, he is fully able to hold out the long notes Loewe gives him.

David Adams is a blustery Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father. He sings his two big numbers in a jaunty fashion, but he does tend to miss the humour in Alfred’s spoken dialogue with Higgins. Taurian Teelucksingh plays Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the only man in the show who openly confesses to loving Eliza. He gives a strong performance of his big number “On The Street Where You Live” but rather fades away in his other scenes. As directed by C&R it is a complete mystery why Eliza should be so angry with him in her song “Show Me”.

Two actors reprise their roles from the 2011 production and, unsurprisingly, are the two who make the show feel the most grounded. Patty Jamieson is again Mrs. Pearce and though she has little to say, Jamieson makes the housekeeper’s opinions known through the irony she infuses into her words and through Pearce’s obvious effort in controlling her temper in the face of her employer’s childishness. Sharry Flett again plays the strong and sensible Mrs. Higgins and gets a round of applause each of the two times she roundly condemns her son’s foolish actions.

In 2011 director Molly Smith had designer Ken MacDonald use Eliza’s birdcage as a unifying symbol. C&R have not looked deeply into the piece and so simply have Lorenzo Savoini create generically pleasant-looking early 20th-century sets. The set’s fixed components of cast iron columns, ornamental brackets and a metal balcony two-thirds up from the floor looks like it was directly inspired by Christine Jones’s train station set for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016). Joyce Padua’s costumes suit the period and the characters’ social class. She does top the ladies with eccentric hats in the Ascot scene, but otherwise her gowns for the women are highly attractive and not satirical.

The Shaw Festival has now staged My Fair Lady twice with one Pygmalion in between in 2015. Let’s hope the Festival again turns to Shaw’s original version of the story so that audiences can see how Lerner and Loewe’s musical striving for a conventional happy ending distorts the logic of the play. Let’s also hope that the Festival never uses such grotesque sound manipulation of the orchestra again. Working to make a live orchestra sound like a studio recording is contrary to the whole point of attending live theatre.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Kristi Frank as Eliza Doolittle and Tom Rooney as Henry Higgins; Kristi Frank as Eliza Doolittle with (l to r) Gryphyn Karimloo, Allan Louis, Graeme Kitagawa, JJ Gerber and members of the cast; Kristi Frank as Eliza Doolittle and Tom Rooney as Henry Higgins; David Adamas in tux as Alfred Doolittle with ensemble; Sharry Flett as Mrs. Higgins, Kristi Frank as Eliza Doolittle and Tom Rooney (in background) as Henry Higgins. © 2024 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.