Whose ‘Fair Lady’? This Time, Eliza’s in Charge

NEW YORK — Poor Eliza. It’s not enough that her own father sells her for 5 pounds to the bully phonetician Henry Higgins. Or that Higgins strips her of her ragged clothes and Cockney accent so she can become a refined if useless lady.

No, the former flower girl is also a failure of feminism, if recent criticism is to be believed.

Don’t believe it.

The plush and thrilling Lincoln Center Theater revival of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” that opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater reveals Eliza Doolittle as a hero — and reveals the musical, despite its provenance and male authorship, as an ur-text of the #MeToo moment. Indeed, that moment has made “My Fair Lady,” which had its Broadway premiere in 1956, better than it ever was.

It was always good, of course, one of the gleaming artifacts and loveliest scores of the Golden Age of American musical theater — a canon now being contested, with cause, for its unenlightened sexual politics.

Yet for all of the wrangling over abuse and objectification in “Carousel,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and other midcentury titles, “My Fair Lady” is a different beast, a satire of class and gender privilege rather than a harrowing drama or lightweight romp about them. In avoiding those extremes, “My Fair Lady” always seemed egalitarian enough, but perhaps too cool and refined for its own good: a perfect musical, not a great one.

I’m not so sure anymore. The director Bartlett Sher’s production uses the current climate of re-examination not only to restore the show’s feminist argument — so lively in the George Bernard Shaw play “Pygmalion,” on which it’s based — but also to warm it up considerably. He achieves this with only minor additions to the text, all drawn from the 1913 original or from Shaw’s screenplay for the 1938 film starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Fittingly, the effect of these tweaks, along with some major nonverbal alterations, is transformative.

So is Lauren Ambrose as a feral and then luminous Eliza. At first, Ambrose concentrates, perhaps too hard, on Eliza’s unlikeliness as the subject of a bet between Higgins and his friend Col. Pickering. (Higgins wagers that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess after six months’ re-education.) She squints and lumbers and makes hay of the “bilious pigeon” sounds that drive Higgins to distraction.

But she is also laying the groundwork for our understanding that Eliza is as powerful a woman as her circumstances permit. It is she who seizes the moment of a chance meeting, outside the Covent Garden opera house where she sells violets to the swells, to make changes she has clearly been imagining for years. She is not the ivory Galatea of the Pygmalion myth, sculpted by a man who despises real women. She sculpts herself, with Higgins as her tool.

We understand this not only from the ferocity of her interactions with him but also from the way she sings. The big revelation of this production is that Ambrose has a stirring voice: lustrous and rich if without the bright ping of most Elizas. That turns out to be an advantage. She delivers her first number — “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” — very quietly and with an intense longing that digs beneath its surface charm to find its stillness and steel.

This sets “My Fair Lady” off in a new direction. The question quickly becomes not whether Eliza will succeed — of course she will — but whether Higgins can accept her success. Will he join her in it, or get out of the way?

Both outcomes seem possible in Harry Hadden-Paton’s wily interpretation, which puts the character’s mansplaining, blowhard ways in context. Younger than the typical Higgins (but more the age Shaw imagined), Hadden-Paton, best known for playing unambiguous good guys on “Downton Abbey” and “The Crown,” makes sense of the character’s on-off switch of vulnerability and hauteur. He is a baby.

This makes him more coherent and potentially more forgivable; he, too, is a captive of his gender and class. As Ambrose’s Eliza completes her metamorphosis, increasing in stature and radiance and vocal power, he grows more baffled and petulant, more protective of his privilege. That privilege is on display in this typically deluxe Lincoln Center Theater production. It has become almost unremarkable — until you look elsewhere on Broadway — that the company has sprung for 29 musicians to play the original, unimprovable orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Phil Lang. Mercifully, the excellent work of the music director, Ted Sperling, is preserved in Marc Salzberg’s understated and naturally balanced sound design.

Balance if not understatement is the production’s visual hallmark too; Sher alternates between very spare, contemporary stage pictures and Higgins’ imposing (and rotating) Wimpole Street town house. This alternation provides the wow factor we expect at Lincoln Center — the house heaves into view like the ship in Sher’s 2015 production of “The King and I” — but also serves a thematic purpose.

At every turn the designers (sets by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Donald Holder) ask us to consider the economic contrasts that govern Eliza’s world. Higgins’ home is a sybarite’s mansion, crowded with servants and modern art. The scene in which Eliza practices her shaky new identity at the opening day of the Ascot races — one of the greatest comic sequences in all musicals — is a gorgeous study of silver and lavender in elegant, forbidding silhouettes.

But as Eliza’s father, Alfred, faces marriage — in an exciting if slightly odd version of “Get Me to the Church on Time,” complete with male cancan dancers in drag — we watch as the shabby tavern that helped maintain his status among the “undeserving poor” flips around to become the shabby church that will deliver him into the worse fate of middle class morality. It’s a charming touch in Christopher Gattelli’s choreography that Alfred (Norbert Leo Butz) is carried off at the end of the number as if on a funeral bier. The casting of a star like Butz in a less-than-starring role may at first seem like overkill; the musical reduces Alfred’s role significantly from its prominence in the play. But with less stage time, the supporting characters have to do more exacting work. Butz, a double Tony Award winner, is just about the only actor I know who could sell two brassy showstoppers while at the same time suggesting the mind of an “original moralist”and the ruthlessness of a man for whom a daughter is just a form of capital. Even his dancing is philosophical.

But all of the supporting roles are smartly considered. As Freddy, the déclassé twit who falls for Eliza and keeps singing “On the Street Where You Live,” Jordan Donica makes an unabashedly silly foil, a man with too much polish and not enough substance. Allan Corduner as Pickering delicately sketches a more complex inner life than is usually permitted the character.

And though Diana Rigg as Higgins’ mother is the definition of luxury casting, as a former Eliza (in the 1974 West End “Pygmalion” with Alec McCowen) she automatically suggests a kinship with her son’s pupil that locks their cross-class solidarity into place. A suffragist march that winds through one of the ensemble scenes underlines the idea.

Such telltales of a feminist reading are accurate to Shaw’s intent. It was he who had Pickering ask whether Higgins is a “man of good character where women are concerned” — to which Higgins in essence responds: There’s no such thing. Higgins understands that relations between the sexes have been hopelessly muddled by social constructs of gender and class; as a wealthy intellectual he can try, as Shaw did, to abstain from the mess entirely.

But “My Fair Lady,” being a classic musical and thus nearly synonymous with romance, keeps complicating that resolve. Infamously, Lerner and Loewe borrowed the ending that was tacked onto the 1939 film without Shaw’s approval: the one in which Eliza returns to Higgins’ study as if to become his helpmeet if not his wife.

I don’t want to spoil this marvelous, redemptive revival’s resolution of that discrepancy. But Sher’s final image shows how history — even if it took 100 years — would eventually start to outgrow its brutes, and how it still might do so compassionately, by teaching them a lesson.

—

Production Notes:

“My Fair Lady”

At the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lct.org. Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes.

Credits: Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe; directed by Bartlett Sher; music direction by Ted Sperling; choreography by Christopher Gattelli; sets by Michael Yeargan; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Marc Salzberg; musical arrangements by Robert Russell Bennett and Phil Lang; production stage manager, Jennifer Rae Moore; general manger, Jessica Niebanck; production manager, Paul Smithyman. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop, producing artistic director, Adam Siegel, managing director, Hattie K. Jutagir, executive director of development and planning.

Cast: Lauren Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton, Norbert Leo Butz, Diana Rigg, Jordan Donica, JoAnna Rhinehart, Allan Corduner, Lee Zarrett, Paul Slade Smith, John Treacy Egan, Christopher Faison, Adam Grupper, Justin Lee Miller, Michael Halling, Joe Hart, Lance Roberts, Kerstin Anderson, Linda Mugleston, Liz McCartney, Cameron Adams, Kate Marilley, Matt Wall, Rebecca Eichenberger, Kevin Quillon, Manu Narayan, Blair Ross, Suellen Estey and Rommel Pierre O’Choa.