MY FAIR LADY
But there were also the chandeliers, and the opulence they epitomized; Oliver Smith’s dazzling sets and Cecil Beaton’s ingenious costumes contributed hugely to My Fair Lady’s original production. “Nothing impresses an audience more or produces a more dependable, spontaneous burst of applause than to see a chandelier appearing from on high,” wrote Lerner in his autobiography, The Street Where I Live, issuing a dictum surely burned forever into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s brain. “In the finale of [My Fair Lady’s] act one there were three.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There is one chandelier in the My Fair Lady playing through this weekend at the Chicago Theatre, but it scarcely makes an impression. In jarring contrast to the lavishly decorated auditorium in which it’s playing, there’s nothing in Ralph Koltai’s set that approaches the sumptuous elegance with which the original Smith designs evoked 1912 London. Instead, Koltai has delivered a drab, semiabstract visual scheme whose most spectacular feature is a gigantic sculpted bust–a bald, androgynous head whose cranium is illuminated from within, presumably to symbolize the story’s insistence on the primacy of the intellect. Misogynistic phonetics professor Henry Higgins molds cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady by prodding, coaxing, and bullying her into proper use of the English language; unlike the mythic figure who gave Pygmalion its name, Higgins shapes his Galatea into a woman by refusing (and fearing) to love her.
As Higgins, Richard Chamberlain relies on lots of activity to convey character–not a surprising choice for this star of TV miniseries and mediocre action movies. The result is a quasi-military Higgins who’s not particularly credible as a man devoted to the power of the intellect; but at least Chamberlain looks nice, sings well, can handle the language, and has enough star power to boost the box office (if not to fill the Chicago’s sprawling stage). Meg Tolin, the understudy who went on for Melissa Errico at the performance I saw, displays a lovely voice and some fire in the later scenes, though her early cockney comedy falls flat. Robert Sella sings strongly as Freddie, the lovestruck gent who croons “On the Street Where You Live”–that brilliant ballad whose simultaneously eloquent and adolescent feeling Sella brings out nicely. Dolores Sutton is effectively brisk as Higgins’s mother–her tart dismissal of her son’s sexist attitudes won applause at the show I saw–but as Eliza’s amoral dad, Julian Holloway is a pallid stand-up-comic substitute for his father, the master clown Stanley Holloway, who created the role.
