For those who have never seen Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical or the 1964 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady pits a poor London flower peddler, Eliza Doolittle, against Professor Henry Higgins, the linguist who schools her in proper English with the end goal of making a lady out of her.
Aristocratic in his family’s standing if not in his manners, Higgins (Martin Kildare) is downright cruel to his charge, calling her a “guttersnipe” and a “squashed cabbage leaf.” Less poetically, he simply declares that Eliza (Katharine McDonough) is “deliciously low and horribly dirty.”
Initially, Eliza puts up with this treatment— and with the horridly long hours of drills (“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” )— because she wants to improve her lot in life. After her first big success with her diction, Eliza and the professor break into dance, and suddenly she is smitten. With what is hard to say, since he doesn’t change his attitude one iota, taking all the credit when she masterfully passes herself off as a princess at a society ball.
Kildare is set-in-his-ways Higgins as if the role were his very skin and bones. His performance during “I’m an Ordinary Man” is all but ordinary. He switches between a collected calm when singing about his bachelor life to a near-psychotic frenzy when he considers letting a woman into his sphere. As a perfect foil to his abrupt manner is fellow linguist Colonel Pickering (Richard Gould), a gentle soul who is forever asking Higgins to go easy on Eliza. Ironically, Pickering is the one who teaches Eliza her manners and so instead of Higgins winning the bet that he could transform her into a lady, it is Pickering who should have won at least half the wager.
McDonough has graced the Carpenter Center’s stage before, most recently in last season’s South Pacific. Once again, she shines both in beauty and talent. Her voice is so lovely that I can hardly fault her for lapsing into crisp diction during “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” in which she longs for lots of chocolate for her to eat and lots of coal making lots of heat.
The dance numbers are entrancing, filled with clever touches such as the Astor elite’s subtle high jinks: The women pass their cards to the men when their husbands aren’t looking, and the men exchange their cards, unbeknownst to their wives. Special kudos to costume designer Karen St Pierre (What woman wouldn’t want Eliza’s sparkling white ball gown and red velvet cape?), Eliza’s ne’er-do-well father (Matthew Henerson), choreographer Daniel Pelzig and Eric Michael Parker as Freddy, the nice guy Eliza couldn’t care less about.
In the end, Eliza only gets a pittance of what she pined for in Scene 1. A man’s head resting on her knee, warm and tender as he can be, who takes good care of her— yes, that would be loverly, Eliza, but you settled for the chocolates and the coal.
My Fair Lady continues at the Carpenter Center through Sunday, Nov. 8. Performances are Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 2pm and 8pm, and Sundays at 2pm, as well as Sunday, Nov. 1, at 7pm and Thursday, Nov. 5, at 8pm. Tickets start at $20. Tickets may be purchased online at www.musical.org or by calling 562-856-1999, ext. 4.The Carpenter Performing Arts Center is located at 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach.
