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There hasn’t been a big London revival of Lerner & Lowe’s all-time classic musical ‘My Fair Lady’ since Martine McCutcheon tackled the role of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle back in 2001, in a production that won plaudits and ran for two years (albeit it also made headlines for McCutcheon’s frequent absences).
So, it’s about time London got another production, and here’s one that US super director Bartlett Sher made earlier: his lavish revival debuted at New York’s Lincoln Center back in 2018, snagging several major awards (including a Tony for best costume design), and the general expectation for a while has been that it was likely to follow his hits ‘Oslo’ and ‘The King and I’ in coming over to London – where it’s of course set.
If you don’t know the story, it’s a musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s hit play ‘Pygmalion’. It follows Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor, as he hits upon the crackpot scheme of turning the unpolished Doolittle into a proper lady. But he finds himself learning from her as much as she him in a show noted for such musical gems as ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’, ‘On the Street Where You Live’, ‘The Rain in Spain’, and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’. It’ll be interesting to see if its – fundamentally well-meaning – sexual and class politics have dated in the last two decades. And it’ll also be interesting to see who Sher casts: word is he’s keen to bring back ‘Downton Abbey’s Harry Hadden-Patton, who played Higgins in New York. One piece of casting is confirmed: the English National Opera orchestra will play the music in a show that’ll run at its home the Coliseum throughout the summer of 2022.
‘My Fair Lady’ is at the London Coliseum, May 7-Aug 27 2022. Tickets go on sale November 23 at 10am. You can sign up for a pre-sale here.
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