Still Loverly

By Gerald Clarke

MY FAIR LADY Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner Music by Frederick Loewe

More than 25 years have passed since she first walked onto a stage. After all that time, it is a relief to know that the rain in Spain still stays mainly in the plain and that My Fair Lady is as loverly as she was in 1956. Frederick Loewe's music has lost none of its enchantment, and Alan Jay Lerner's book and lyrics, which of course owe more than a passing debt to George Bernard Shaw, seem more than ever to be models of literacy and wit. Some other musicals from the '40s and '50s--The Most Happy Fella, for instance--now seem dated; this one, which was set so long ago anyway, will probably never show its age.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of human beings. If the play is 25 years old, then it follows that Rex Harrison, who was the original Henry Higgins, must be 25 years older than he was then--that is, 73. Now Harrison is a splendid 73, more attractive at three score and 13 than most men are at 37, and his voice will doubtless retain its music when he is 103. But he is perhaps 20 years older than Higgins, the most irascible misogynist since Jack the Ripper, ought to be. Neither Shaw nor Lerner ever indicated that the professor and the flower girl would wind up in a clinch, but the possibility, which gave the story much of its electricity, was always there. That charge is what is lacking from the new production. Harrison's Higgins is urbane and amusing, a rare companion despite himself, but he is not a possible mate for Eliza Doolittle, who could well be his granddaughter. Indeed, he is lucky that he could find an actress old enough to play his own mother--the inimitable Cathleen Nesbitt, who was also in the original cast and who at 92 is still pouring the tea in her box at Ascot.

There are other problems with this Fair Lady. Eliza is played by Nancy Ringham, the American understudy who was suddenly called in when Cheryl Kennedy, an English actress, was forced out by illness. Ringham has both a pretty face and an attractive voice, but she does not make a good Cockney, or make a very convincing climb up the slippery slopes of the English language. More important, she does not have anything like the fire, the almost feral drive of a good Eliza. Not only was Higgins a great teacher; Eliza was also a great pupil. That "squashed cabbage leaf he picked up in Covent Garden was in fact made of gold.

If this production is not as memorable as the original, however, it is still, by the standards of most musicals, very good indeed. Nicholas Wyman is a delightfully silly Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the bumbling aristocrat who falls in love with Eliza at Ascot and thereafter spends most of his time burbling love songs on the street where she lives. Milo O'Shea, who plays her father, Alfred P. Doolittle, is a fine and feisty rogue, and Jack Gwillim manages to be both good-hearted and hopelessly stuffy, just as Colonel Pickering, that confirmed old bachelor, should be. Cecil Beaton's black-and-white costumes will always cause gasps of pleasure, and Oliver Smith's sets will forever define the boundaries of 27A Wimpole Street, where a flower girl was transformed into a lady. Within those walls there is a magic yet. But audiences will have to try a little harder than they did in 1956 to see just how fair the lady really is.

--By Gerald Clarke

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