The Lord above gave man an arm of iron: so says Alfred Doolittle, England’s most original moralist. By design rather than luck, James Brining’s new My Fair Lady (a co-production by Opera North and Leeds Playhouse) gives its Prof Higgins just the opposite. Loose-limbed, soft-edged and chaotic, his vulnerable model of masculinity – set against an Eliza of unwavering wit and self-possession – offsets the book’s occasional misogyny, in a production that takes its interrogation of social mobility seriously but still conjures up plenty of comedy and chemistry along the way.
Casting opera singers in musical theatre can go very well or very badly; in the case of soprano Katie Bird – like much of the cast, a member of Opera North’s chorus – it’s pure inspiration. From her very first “loverly”, sheis an irresistible Eliza: radiantly sung, innately funny and thoroughly plausible in a characterisation that avoids cliche on both sides of her “rain in Spain” transformation. John Hopkins’s Higgins takes a little longer to hit his stride, but I’m an Ordinary Man finds him visibly, if not always audibly, in his element, and the brittle, laugh-or-cry energy he brings to his later scenes with (and without) Eliza is compelling.
More conventional, but no less appealing, Richard Mosley-Evans is a twinkling, Falstaffian Alfred Doolittle – he and his chorus colleagues make operatic merry with I’m Getting Married in the Morning in particular – while Ahmed Hamad is a fresh-voiced, starry-eyed Freddy and Dean Robinson an impish Col Pickering. In a world of self-absorbed men, Brining is careful to highlight Eliza’s female allies: Helen Évora’s quietly compassionate Mrs Pearce, and Miranda Bevin’s indomitable Mrs Higgins. The orchestra of Opera North turns its hand to musical theatre as deftly as its singers, playing with sparkling lightness of touch under conductor Oliver Rundell.
Madeleine Boyd’s single, hybrid set, with Higgins’s filing cabinets stacked atop Doolittle’s glazed-brick pub, and gramophones and flower-carts wheeled in as needed, is evocatively Edwardian, as are her costumes – jewel tones for Eliza, muted greys for high society – and Guy Hoare’s gas-lamp lighting design. Boyd’s and Brining’s hilarious solution to the infamous Ascot scene, necessarily staged here with neither Cecil Beaton’s dresses nor his budget, is especially inspired.
Tempting as it is to class My Fair Lady as a Cinderella story, the truth is messier: Eliza grasps long before Higgins does that the outward markers of another social class won’t automatically secure her all its privileges, and upward mobility on its own can’t guarantee a happy ending. The pair’s reunion in the final moments of the show has always been ambiguous. Here, poignantly, it’s hinted she may not have returned at all – or at least not yet.
• At Leeds Playhouse until 29 June
