Dame Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Higgins and Amara Okereke as Eliza Doolittle
(Picture: Marc Brenner)An Eliza Doolittle for a new generation, Amara Okereke absolutely smashes it in Bartlett Sher’s joyful staging, here after a triumphant run in New York, of the classic 1956 Lerner and Loewe musical. The first black actress to play the role, the 25-year-old has an effortlessly clear, full and expressive singing voice and can be meltingly soft, blazingly furious and beautifully still. She owns the Coliseum stage, and the role.
As Henry Higgins, the phonetics professor who bets he can pass a cockney flowergirl off as a Duchess, Downton star Harry Hadden-Paton has a manic edge. He is slightly more age-appropriate than is usual, recalibrating the couple’s combative romance. I thought I detected hints that this Higgins is gay but repressed, fascinated and frightened by Eliza (my wife told me I was imagining it).
There’s sterling supporting work here. Malcolm Sinclair was born to play Higgins’ benign, drifty compatriot Colonel Pickering. Stephen K Amos brings a comedian’s timing and delivery, if not the finest singing voice, to the part of Eliza’s dustman dad, Alfred. And here is Vanessa Redgrave, frail but game, snipping off devastating apercus as Higgins’s mum.
The sets are clever, the costumes stunning, and there’s a full-on Broadway dance routine featuring showgirls, showboys and everything in between for Alfred’s anthem Get Me to the Church on Time. This is a Rolls Royce of a revival, precision-tooled and carrying the weight of the show’s history lightly.
That Eliza is black reinforces the class divisions between her and Higgins when they are together, but only subconsciously, as there’s colourblind casting of proles and aristocrats throughout, like in Bridgerton. And as with Bridgerton, you wonder why someone hasn’t done this before.
Designer Micheal Yeargan supplies a meticulous Edwardian drawing room for Higgins, toy theatre sets for the working class milieu. Sher clearly didn’t plan it this way when he first staged the show at Lincoln Center in 2018, but the poverty of Eliza’s background chimes uncomfortably with Britain in 2022. Catherine Zuber’s costumes subtly reference the designs for the 1964 film without being in thrall to it. Likewise, Hadden-Paton does something akin to Rex Harrison’s speak-singing, while reinventing the role of Higgins. His performance is hugely impressive, if hard to love.
Anyway, it’s all about Eliza, really: her journey, her songs. Okereke made me hear the tongue-twisting wordplay of Show Me (sung to Sharif Afifi’s doltishly adoring toff, Freddy) properly for the first time and brings fire to Just You Wait. When she hits the final high note of I Could Have Danced All Night, the set receding behind her as if the whole world is falling away, it’s devastating. Sher stages a similar telescoping effect – Eliza exiting through the audience, Higgins dwindling into the distance – for the pleasingly ambiguous finale.
My Fair Lady is so witty and well-crafted it’s hard to do a duff version, given enough resources, and this show has plenty. But it’s harder still to make it feel fresh. Sher manages it and has surely also turned Okerere from a promising actress into a bona fide star.
