Some have called it “the perfect musical”. An exaggeration? Not if success is the measure. My Fair Lady ran for a record-breaking 2,717 performances following its Broadway opening in March 1956; has been given an unprecedented number of stagings around the world; and, translated to the screen in 1964, became an Oscar- and Bafta-winning hit. Its seemingly universal appeal is partly explained by the beautifully balanced combination of Frederick Loewe’s melodies (including I Could Have Danced All Night and Get Me to the Church on Time) with Alan Jay Lerner’s vivid storyline, adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – the 1913 play and its 1938 Oscar-winning film version (adapted by Shaw and others).
In this new co-production between Leeds Playhouse and Opera North, the story of Eliza, the “lowly” flower-seller who is tutored in “correct” English by celebrated linguist Henry Higgins until she is able to pass as a princess at an embassy ball, is as witty, magical and “loverly” as any audiences could wish and promises to be as popular as its predecessors.
Characters are gorgeous in Madeleine Boyd’s structured, earth-toned Edwardian costumes, while her split-level, movable set transports us from Higgins’s study to Ascot (horses seem to race thanks to Sebastian Frost’s sound design) and beyond. The music, directed and conducted by Oliver Rundell, shimmers, soars and rollicks; Lucy Hind’s choreography, beautifully executed by the cast, gives it crisp physical expression.
Even the late Eric Bentley, a Shaw scholar and one of the musical’s rare detractors, might have been won over by James Brining’s fine, intelligent production, with its understated, Shavian sense of purpose. Here, soprano Katie Bird’s Eliza is no impressionable young girl, to be moulded by John Hopkins’s effervescent Higgins, but a capable, determined working woman (the power of her delivery leaves us in no doubt as to which is the stronger character). With the lightest of touches, Brining reveals Shaw’s critique of the British class system to be as neatly embedded in the structure of the musical as in the play.
• My Fair Lady is at Leeds Playhouse until 29 June
