My Fair Lady – London Coliseum

Harry Hadden-Paton, Amara Okereke and Malcolm Sinclair in My Fair Lady at the London Coliseum. Picture: Marc Brenner

My Fair Lady continues at the London Coliseum until 27 August 2022.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Following in the footsteps of icons of the magnitude of Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn has to be a pretty daunting prospect but the fearless Amara Okereke makes Eliza Doolittle truly her own in this first full West End revival of My Fair Lady for 21 years.

That was the one where Martine McCutcheon won an Olivier despite missing numerous performances and withdrawing five months early from the show’s transfer from the National to Drury Lane.

Okereke is far more likely to follow the golden path of Walton-on-Thames-born Julie Andrews who went on to become a worldwide showbiz legend through Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music as well.

But it was My Fair Lady that made her, first of all on Broadway in 1956 then in the West End for five and a half years, the show playing a combined 49,998 performances.

Like Andrews, who had previously starred in The Boy Friend on Broadway, Okereke is no newcomer. The 25-year-old from Leeds won The Stage Debut Award for Best Actress in a Musical for playing Cosette in Les Misérables (the first black actress to do so) and has been in Chichester’s Oklahoma!, The Boy Friend at the Menier and, more recently, Spring Awakening at the Almeida.

But Eliza is one giant step up the ladder, an opportunity she grabs with both hands and a purity of voice that makes even the well-worn ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ come up as fresh as paint.

This is the 2018 Lincoln Center production of the classic Lerner and Loewe musical that London is inheriting for the summer with Downton Abbey star Harry Hadden-Paton reprising the Professor Higgins he played on Broadway, a younger, less patronising Higgins than Rex Harrison but more clueless about women, a proper public school Hooray Henry.

Originally a musical version of Pygmalion, a George Bernard Shaw play about the British class system written at a time when women still did not have the vote and suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings, this is American director Bartlett Sher’s vision of a My Fair Lady for a new generation of theatregoers.

It’s a vision that would benefit from a trim as three hours is too long for a musical especially when it is preceded by a 25-minute delay before curtain-up on press night.

That irritation didn’t help and at first it all seemed a bit pedestrian. Was I the only one to find flower seller Eliza’s early mangling of the English language almost unintelligible? The 2,350-seater Coliseum is a huge space and it’s a fair old way from Dress Circle to stage which might explain it but the piece bursts into life in scene five when all ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain’ and ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen’ tuition from the Professor joyously bears fruit. Eliza is transformed from loud-mouthed Cockney to a charming, beautifully-spoken young lady.

The light-bulb moment when they realise ‘By George, she’s got it’ begets a triumphant jig from Higgins and his linguist partner Colonel Pickering but, of course, it is really Eliza’s triumph as we discover at the end when, educated in the finer things of life and decidedly her own woman, she walks away from the rather unworldly mentors she has so successfully used to her advantage.

When they bring her up to speed sufficiently to be let off the leash at Royal Ascot, the wicked ‘Ascot Gavotte’ parody of upper-class snobbery is deliciously done and magnificently choreographed  by Christopher Gattelli. In one of the show’s wittiest scenes, the racing, here represented by a galloping soundtrack, is just a sideshow to the fashion and social small-talk – and thank goodness the gaffe of horses going the wrong way round, as perpetrated in the Oscar-winning movie, is not repeated.

Having not only a Dame but a national treasure in Vanessa Redgrave on the cast list can only be good news at the box office, more’s the pity that she does not have more to do as Higgins’ frail but formidable mother who takes Eliza under her wing.

The songs need no introduction. If ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, ‘On the Street Where You Live’ and ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ don’t get you humming them on the way home, you’re probably at the wrong musical.

But the extravagance of the 36-piece English National Opera orchestra under the practiced baton of Gareth Valentine (with the ubiquitous Alex Parker as assistant musical director) adds another dimension – and the bawdy party scene in Covent Garden’s flower market for Eliza’s father Alfred’s upcoming nuptials where ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ is reprised and ‘Get Me to the Church On Time’ given full rein is a real show-stopper (Stephen K Amos plays the boozy dustman).

The lushness of the music is more than matched by the gorgeousness of the costumes (Catherine Zuber has a field day) with the Royal Ascot outfits, especially Eliza’s, breathtaking.

The performances, from the often obnoxious but loveable Hadden-Paton downwards, are all spot-on. While the insufferable Higgins always see the flower girl in Eliza, Malcolm Sinclair’s Pickering is more mature in his appreciation of what she has made of herself, while Sharif Afifi is suitably besotted as the lovesick Freddy Eynsford-Hill (giving a fine ‘On the Street Where You Live’) and Maureen Beattie a warm but stern presence as housekeeper Mrs Pearce.

But it’s Okereke’s show. Note the name. You and the world will be seeing and hearing a whole lot more of it in the years to come.

Jeremy Chapman