My Fair Lady – Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

Lauren Ambrose and Harry Hadden-Paton in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center at the Vivian Beaumont, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

My Fair Lady continues at Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, New York.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

Another week, another sumptuous revival of a sumptuous classic musical. That’s the story out of New York this spring.

Right on the heels of the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel comes Lincoln Center’s fantastical mounting of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. It’s enough to send vintage musical theatre fanatics into unshakeable delirium.

My Fair Lady has the no-expense-spared look and feel of Lincoln Center’s celebrated revivals over the past several years of South Pacific and The King and I, all three productions under the helm of director Bartlett Sher.

Sher’s modus operandi is a deep appreciation and luxuriant refurbishing of a show’s virtues with no great proclivity for reinterpretation, although in My Fair Lady he does give the ending a surprise twist. It’s a twist, however, that may well be in line with the initial thinking of George Bernard Shaw, on whose play Pygmalion the musical is based.

And Shavian brilliance – his ideas on society, class, the sexes and language – glitters throughout this production, with Alan Jay Lerner’s book enacted to perfection by a cast headed by Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, the esteemed phonetics professor, and Lauren Ambrose as Eliza Doolittle, the guttersnipe flower seller who becomes his star pupil.

With a 29-piece orchestra conducted by music director Ted Sperling, perfection also marks the handling of the inspired score, as Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s music go from lush romantic melody to music hall jauntiness and tongue-tripping patter.

Hadden-Paton, a British actor making his New York theatre debut, brings an athletic virility to the loquacious, domineering Higgins, bounding up and down the twisting staircase of his luxurious library while spouting words at more than a mile a minute in such numbers as ‘I’m an Ordinary Man’ and ‘A Hymn to Him’. And he beautifully sums up the impact of Eliza on his life in the climactic ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ with compelling introspection.

Ambrose, whose career until now has been shaped in non-musicals, such as the Lincoln Center revival of Clifford Odets’ 1930s drama Awake and Sing! (directed by Sher) and most prominently, the television series Six Feet Under, delivers a grandly sung and deeply etched Eliza, combining both a sense of strength – even a hint of nobility – and fetching winsomeness behind her comic Cockney yowls of indignation and despair. She imbues ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ with a gleeful yearning, while there’s genuine ferocity in her ‘Just You Wait’, detailing the various dire fates she would like for Higgins.

Most important is the chemistry the two register along with the friction between relentlessly demanding teacher and willing but independent student.

Providing the show’s music hall diversions with bountiful panache is Norbert Leo Butz’s Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s wayward dustman father, with his own take on morality. Butz brings an earthy playfulness and sprightly stiff-legged dancing to ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’, songs that grow into production numbers encompassing Christopher Gattelli’s lively choreography.

‘Luck’ is also marked by a nod to feminist sensibilities, with a parade of suffragettes marching through the crowd of prancing street people, while ‘Church’ becomes especially rowdy with its inclusion of high-kicking florodora-type gals, some of them cross-dressing guys, high-kicking their way across the stage.

Also happily prominent is Allan Corduner’s Colonel Pickering, the retired army man and linguistics buff, who becomes Higgins’ house guest and more humane partner in the scheme to transform Eliza into a ladylike persona ready to attend the Embassy Ball. He makes a fine addition to the singing and dancing when he joins Ambrose and Hadden-Paton in ‘The Rain in Spain’ celebrating Eliza’s first victory over the letters ‘A’ and ‘H’.

Notable contributions come from Diana Rigg, personifying matronly grace as Higgins’ wise mother, and Jordan Donica as the empty-headed society lay-about Freddy Eynsford-Hill who falls under Eliza’s spell and sings in heroic fashion ‘On the Street Where You Live’.

Other principal roles include Manu Narayan as the unsavoury Zoltan Karpathy, once Higgins’ student and now a money-grubbing competitor as a phonetics expert, and Linda Mugleston as Mrs. Pierce, Higgins’ stern but sympathetic housekeeper.

My Fair Lady hardly needs to prove its credentials as great musical theatre. The original 1956 production ran for 2,717 performances, and the movie version was an Oscar-winner. However, Sher’s work gives the revival its own impressive sense of importance, with a series of breath-taking moments. In addition to the performances, many of them come from the almost-magical gliding into place of Michael Yeargan’s eye-filling scenery pieces onto the revolving stage.

There’s the way the set disappears into the gathering darkness of Donald Holder’s lighting behind Ambrose. leaving her alone on stage with just a spotlight to finish ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ in singular triumph. And further, there’s the inspired placing of the orchestra on stage for the Embassy Ball that opens the Act II, and finally, the way the pub exterior turns about to become a church punctuating ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’

And in every scene, Catherine Zuber’s costumes add to the Edwardian elegance of the proceedings, reaching their zenith in the lavishness of the Ascot Race and Embassy Ball sequences.

With the luminous names of those involved in the original production still glowing in our communal memory, it would be foolhardy to say that this My Fair Lady is the fairest of them all, but it certainly makes it case.

Ron Cohen