My Fair Lady – Theatre du Chatelet, Paris

Katherine Manley and Alex Jennings in My Fair Lady at the Theatre du Chatelet, Paris

My Fair Lady continues at the Theatre du Chatelet, Paris, until 1 January, 2014.

Here’s the ultimate Christmas treat for lovers of musicals – a trip on Eurostar and a couple of best seats at the Chatelet, surely one of the world’s most beautiful theatres, to see perhaps the most iconic of them all, Lerner and Loewe’s magical My Fair Lady.

There’s still time to get there as the show, starring Alex Jennings and Katherine Manley, ends its 29-performance run on New Year’s Day, and it’s a gorgeous, sumptuous, no-expense-spared feast that’s well worth the effort, especially now that Paris is only two and a quarter hours from London by train.

When the Chatelet first revived the 1956 masterpiece three years ago, they toyed with turning Lerner’s witty words into French, but how do you translate ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ or ‘In Hartford, Hereford or Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen’ without losing his genius or the whole idea of the English class system?

This musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion has a story and songs so well known – how the toffs “make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe”, the common flower seller Eliza Doolittle – that there’s simply no need to dumb them down for the French, although there are surtitles above the stage for those who can’t make out the outrageous Cockney accent Manley adopts for the early scenes.

Besides, great cineastes that they are, the Parisians almost certainly know the 1964 movie with the lovely Audrey Hepburn acting but not singing – the one where they upset racing buffs by filming the Royal Ascot sequence with the horses going the wrong way round – every bit as well as we do, and are word-perfect on classics such as ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’.

In any case, Chatelet regulars have got used to the great musicals being sung in English, having seen The Sound of Music, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, Carousel and Sunday in the Park With George in the past few years. And the only one they didn’t care for? Would you believe, Les Miserables, about which, according to theatre director Jean-Luc Choplin, “one very angry person wrote to ask how we dared put Victor Hugo on in English!”

Choplin so adores musicals that he has Into the Woods coming in April, The King and I in June, and the world premiere of An American in Paris next December before heading to Broadway in the spring of 2015.

But enough about the future, what about My Fair Lady in the here and now? I think you will have got the picture now – it’s a blast with Jennings and Nicholas Le Prevost reprising the Higgins and Colonel Pickering roles they did in the West End in 2002-3 (and at the Chatelet in 2010), and for which Jennings won an Olivier gong; the wonderfully throaty Donald Maxwell, whom Parisians so enjoyed in 2010, does his scene-stealing Alfred Doolittle turn again; Caroline Blakiston has another wonderful go at Mrs Higgins – she did the part at the National – and there’s a brilliant cameo from American actress Lee Delong as the housekeeper, Mrs Pearce.

The 40-piece orchestra under the baton of Jayce Ogren has a ball with the legendary tunes, Robert Carsen directs again (he headed up the 2010 revival), Tim Hatley’s sets are magnificently opulent as are Anthony Powell’s lavish costumes, never more so than in the Ascot Gavotte ensemble scene. Helped by government subsidies, the Chatelet never does things by halves, as we saw in their last show, Sunday in the Park With George.

My Fair Lady was a sell-out last time and there were very few empty seats when I saw it in midweek. The one negative is that it is too long. By the time the the orchestra had taken its umpteenth curtain call (the French are big on standing ovations), it was 11.25pm, and three hours 20 minutes is 20 minutes too long. Only Shakespeare is permitted to be that long.

Admittedly, it was never a short show: the film ran for 170 minutes and last year’s Christmas revival at the Sheffield Crucible touched three hours, but the sets are so elaborate in France that extra time is taking up in changing them.

The only other possible criticism is that Manley, a fine British soprano better known for her English National Opera roles than in musicals (although she did The Sound of Music at the Chatelet two years ago), seemed a little old for the part, but that may be because we’re accustomed to a 20-year-old Julie Andrews landing the part on Broadway.

American soprano Christine Arand, also well known to French audiences, is doing the part at some performances, but whoever you see, it is a funny, joyous evening so worth the effort and such a change from some of the dubious innuendo that today’s writers seem to need to get a laugh.

Jeremy Chapman

www.chatelet-theatre.com/2013-2014