My Fair Lady: A star is born in a production that puts Broadway’s to shame

Molly Lynch (centre) and cast in My Fair Lady, at the Leicester Curve
Molly Lynch (centre) and cast in My Fair Lady, at the Leicester Curve - Marc Brenner

The last big outing for My Fair Lady – two years ago at the Coliseum – was the Bartlett Sher-directed Broadway production that delivered a right old feminist kick in the teeth to Prof Henry Higgins, the male-chauvinist phonetician who plucks a cockney flower-girl off the streets and turns her into a well-spoken lady but still treats her like so much “baggage”.

The Bernard Shaw play – Pygmalion (1913) – upon which the 1956 Lerner and Loewe classic is based ends with said flower-girl, Eliza Doolittle, coolly departing, and Higgins complacently assured of her eventual return. The climax in Sher’s version was more defiantly rejectionist. In Nikolai Foster’s delightful revival at Curve, though, the happy ending is unambiguous: a relieved Higgins still goadingly inquires “Where the devil are my slippers?” after Eliza returns – as was the case with the 1964 Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn film – but in contrast to the chaste celluloid closing image, here we get a long, loving kiss between the leads, Molly Lynch and David Seadon-Young.

Instead of looking clichéd, their rom-com clinch feels simply winning; it’s a kiss between equals, with Higgins – a chastened if not changed man who knows he has been bested – having met his match; he has refined her accent, she has refined his personality. And the whole evening attests to creative devotion towards time-honoured material.

Yes, to today’s eyes and ears, some of that material could be deemed “problematic”; the snootish opening number in praise of RP and Higgins’s patronising pensées on women aren’t for the easily offended.

But Foster trusts the show and feels no need to apologise for it or amend it. There’s no vogueish video-camera-work here; even so, you get a close-up sense of nuance: the way Higgins’s disdain holds at one safe remove things he can’t fully comprehend. Sonorous of singing voice, Seadon-Young is more youthful than Harrison was too (avoiding any potentially icky age-gap); he brings a puppyish eagerness to his social experiment and when he clutches in despair at the hem of his mother’s skirt after being spurned by Eliza, that image – among others – expresses a childlike dependence. It’s a nice gag also to have him reliant on his bemused housekeeper to get dressed as he croons, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” – his flies left undone, too.

Molly Lynch (as Eliza Doolittle) and Damian Buhagiar in  in My Fair Lady, at the Leicester Curve
Molly Lynch (as Eliza Doolittle) and Damian Buhagiar in in My Fair Lady, at the Leicester Curve - Marc Brenner

Everything you’d want from a show of this scale is here for the admiring – Joanna Goodwin’s choreography puts the cockney traders and beer-swillers (pints larkily kept in hand) through their paces, with old man Doolittle’s Get Me to the Church on Time a riotous knees-up that may make you hanker for a less policed, less uptight age. But, terrific supporting performances aside, the main sensation is Lynch’s picture-perfect, vocally impeccable Eliza. She passes from pouting, cawing “guttersnipe” into constricted gentility and out into radiant self-possession in a way that has you transfixed. “I could have danced all night,” she sings – amid a moonlit mist – her eyes as a-twinkle as a night-sky itself. And it sure looks to me like a star is born.

Until Jan 4; curveonline.co.uk