Less Than Fair

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Before the revisionist My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, Richard Chamberlain went on the warpath, trying to get his co-star sacked in favor of her understudy. Without having seen the understudy -- but having endured Melissa Errico's hapless Eliza Doolittle -- one can be sure Chamberlain was right about her. Rarely has a plum Broadway role been so ineptly handled. While Errico sings gloriously if unimaginatively, she is an unconvincing Cockney whose linguistic foibles wobble from syllable to syllable, quite a handicap in a show about the social importance of accents. She is plausible only in two feminist-flavored moments, denouncing Chamberlain's Henry Higgins as heartless in the first act and reviling him as a sexist pig at the end.

In a version also saddled with Julian Holloway's cutesy capering as Eliza's debauched father, Dolores Sutton's vamping as Higgins' mother and sets that make the Covent Garden flower market look like a Florida condo in mid- construction and render Higgins' study fit for a Vincent Price horror flick, Chamberlain shows calculated charm and wit. He sings better than Rex Harrison and looks terrific. His best scenes are with the normally bland Pickering, whom Paxton Whitehead makes droll.

The schizoid staging reflects director Howard Davies' determination to do something new vs. the insistence of the estate of librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on replicating the 1956 staging. Most impiously, Davies hints that Eliza leaves Higgins forever, as in Shaw's Pygmalion. That idea fights the musical's text and, indeed, its boy-meets-girl form. The text and form win the brawl. But nothing in this show is close to a knockout.