Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

and comments that the reviews “were better than they deserved to be.”53 At the official opening night, however, Harrison “performed elegantly and beautifully” and Ringham “lifted her game, hit all the top notes with assurance, and performed with gusto and radiant charm.” In the New York Times, Mel Gussow’s review acknowledged that Ringham was clearly affected by the last-minute substitution, but absolutely raved about Harrison’s performance, describing him as “triumphant” and “the quintessential Higgins.” Gussow also had praise for the Mrs. Higgins of the ninety-three-year-old Cathleen Nesbitt, who returned to her original role and was “a graceful presence.” There was praise for the choreography, which had once more been reproduced by Crandall Diehl, and for Garland’s staging, though Oliver Smith’s reconceived designs were perceived to be “short of the original elegance.” The lighting and amplification also caused problems, yet overall Gussow’s article stated that the piece “endures as a paragon of wit, romance and musicality.”54

But the note of inhibition about Ringham’s performance, which according to Garland resulted from Harrison’s “ill-temper and unpleasantness,” was to limit the New York engagement to three months, “because the aura of the Eliza Doolittle was never really there.”55 It closed on November 29 after 124 performances, including a four-week extension. The director and producers had all hoped for more, but in the end, the lack of “an inspirational Eliza” was to unhinge the balance in the Higgins-Eliza relationship, and the show could go no farther, even with its legendary male lead.56

1993 BROADWAY REVIVAL

In 1993 Fair Lady was booked to return to Broadway, and again it was to be the final destination in a U.S. tour. This time, though, the production was completely new. Attempts to cling to the original conception in all previous stagings were largely dismissed, with the only obvious connection found in the casting of Julian Holloway, Stanley’s son, as Doolittle. The troubles experienced in the 1981 revival were nothing compared to the fate that befell the 1993 staging, which was reported to have cost somewhere in the region of $2.5 million. The pre-Broadway tour began in Fort Meyers, Florida, and already problems had started to emerge. A week before the opening, Melissa Errico, who was due to play Eliza, ruptured a capillary in her right vocal cord, and her understudy, Meg Tolin, had not sung the part in rehearsals; Errico’s costumes did not fit Tolin, so replacements had to be hired locally. Ralph Koltai’s sets did not fit the theater and had to be quickly changed; the first performance was then hijacked by a stagehands’ strike, during which the actors managed to improvise their way through the performance. Two days later, the sets were being loaded into a truck to move to Orlando, when Fort Meyers was hit by a tornado; some of the sets and costumes were seriously damaged. The New York Times catalogued these and many other problems in an article on July 2, suggesting that the direction, choreography, sets, and cast (which included Richard Chamberlain as Higgins) each had major weaknesses.57

Howard Davies’s production aimed for a radical interpretation of a well-loved show, which he implied had been treated with too much reverence in recent times. Fran Weissler, one of the producers, commented that “We asked for a new concept and supported one.”58 Davies’s reading darkened the story, so that Higgins’s library was now more reminiscent of a laboratory. A huge phrenological head and various pieces of apparatus dominated the set. Higgins’s engagement with Eliza was more physical than before; at one point he sat astride her, and at another he prized open her mouth like a dentist. The Belgian painter Magritte’s surrealistic work influenced certain aspects of the staging, especially the Ascot scene, in which some of the aristocrat spectators descended from the sky on swings and stood suspended in midair for the entire tableau. The “I Could Have Danced All Night” scene was set against a deep blue sky with only a window (hanging in midair) and a bed as scenery. On the other hand, Doolittle’s scenes were staged fairly conventionally.

On the whole, the critics admired Davies’s efforts to take a new look at the piece, but none of them found his view entirely successful. In the New York Times, for instance, David Richards said that the show wanted to be “a brave new My Fair Lady” but that it worked only “to a certain extent.”59 The production’s drawn-out problems had been insurmountable, and it was ultimately neither revisionist nor traditional. After opening on December 9, 1993, at the Virginia Theatre, it closed on May 1, 1994, with only 165 performances under its belt. Subsequently, the show has not been seen on Broadway, though it was performed in concert by the New York Philharmonic four times between March 7 and March 10, 2007, at Avery Fisher Hall. The cast included the TV star Kelsey Grammer and Kelli O’Hara, a Broadway favorite who went on to star in the acclaimed 2008 revival of South Pacific at the Lincoln Center Theater. But My Fair Lady has yet to receive a full-blown Broadway revival for the new millennium.

BRITISH REVIVALS

During the 1960s, My Fair Lady went on a two-year tour around the UK, just as it had done for nearly seven years in America. Two separate companies toured England, and everywhere it went it caused a stir. When the production visited Birmingham in 1964, a flyer proclaimed: “Due to the tremendous reception given to this magnificent musical we are pleased to announce that its run must be EXTENDED INTO 1965! The best in entertainment at the finest theatre in the Midlands.”60 It was described as “A lavish new £60,000 production” but was clearly based in every way on the London staging. In 1977, however, all that was to change when Sir Cameron Mackintosh scored one of his earliest successes with a completely new staging, which would “recapture the spirit of the original but with new visual designs and modern stage technology.”61 The impetus for the staging was a grant from