“Zings off the stage”: My Fair Lady, at Leeds Playhouse, reviewed

If you want to kill a musical, turn it into a movie. The cats, the phantom of the opera, South Pacific… the history of cinema is littered with bad remakes of world-conquering theatrical sensations. But it’s almost worse when a musical succeeds on its own terms and—like a face-eating mask—overwrites the original show in the collective memory. I once saw a newspaper describing a West End revival The sound of Music as a “stage version of the classic film”, which is a bit of a description pride and prejudice as a novelization of the hit BBC drama.

The main exhibition is that of Lerner and Loewe My dear lady, which for most of us now means the 1964 film—that gorgeous Technicolor pageant that ditches the show’s original star, Julie Andrews, in favor of Audrey Hepburn, just for the visuals. All very nice, but watching it today you sometimes wonder how this imposing three-story show broke all the records on Broadway and in the West End and left Rodgers and Hammerstein speechless.

Opera North’s production My dear lady will give you the answer. You arrive expecting big hats and opulent set pieces. Instead, you have drama that flies off the stage: indelible songs, dialogue that sparkles and crackles, and a cast that finds meaning in every line. You probably know George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – the 1913 play on which the show is based – gives My dear lady an advance for the intellectual bite. What you might not expect is to hear GBS’ acid licks after laugh from an audience primed for tunes to take it all in a spirit of open-hearted delight. It’s a performance that thrives in front of a live audience: no movie can give you that.

So Shaw provides the brains, Lerner and Loewe provide the heart, and the whole thing just flies into a fire of pleasure. That’s what My dear lady It is; that’s what we missed; and hats off to director James Brining for demonstrating that – and for allowing his cast to inhabit their characters on terms that owe nothing to Harrison, Holloway or Hepburn. John Hopkins is a little Higgins; a floppy-haired dandy monomaniac with a flash of madness and rubber limbs who can – and repeatedly does – find delicious subtext in Shaw’s most imbeciles. You’d almost think (and it’s Lerner’s least convincing tweak to Shaw’s original) that he might be a love interest for Eliza (Katie Bird).

Bird plays Eliza as a particularly determined flower girl whose ultimate social triumph is anything but a certainty. One of the best things about Brining’s production is that Eliza doesn’t simply go through a Cinderella-like transformation. You can feel her anxiety, and the edge in her voice keeps coming out (speaking, not singing, that is: Bird has a dark, clear soprano, and on “I Could Have Danced All Night” she hit her high notes for six). It must have been tempting to give up on a generic feminist rereading My dear lady. Brining takes a more subtle but rewarding route and allows the characters to reveal themselves: Higgins’ elegant persona disintegrates as Eliza grows in self-confidence. Meanwhile, the sets are exuberant, the designs evoke an Edwardian London that owes more to Spy than Cecil Beaton, and the supporting cast – from Richard Mosley-Evans’ bluff Dolittle to the endearingly oblivious Freddy of Ahmed Hamad – are captivatingly taken. It is conducted by conductor Oliver Rundell and the Opera North orchestra, unamplified and (apart from some jiggery-pokery where the overture should be) performing what sounded like the original orchestrations. They shone, but the musicians were sequestered behind a screen and didn’t even get a curtain call. The only sour note in a joyous evening.

By comparison, Grange Park Opera’s new Donizetti staging Daughter of the regiment it feels strangely incomplete. In the credits, the chorus is splendid, Tonio (Nico Darmanin) and Sulpice (Enrico Marabelli) are both good and likeable singers, and Julia Sitkovetsky as Marie is a real star. Her coloring is like sunlight on water; and when it rises, shining, over the soldiers’ chorus, it may be the most exciting sound you will hear all summer.

It’s sung in English without surtitles – a brave choice, probably meant to enhance the comedic back-and-forth between the audience and the cast. But unlike My dear ladythis isn’t the kind of comedy that runs on wit and one-liners, so the payoff is negligible.

The entire first act is actually played in front of the curtain (in this case, a large shed wall), so there’s only room for the cast to stand there and sing, although they occasionally collect some wooden boxes. Two full directors are credited (John Doyle and Nikki Woollaston), but the result felt barely half an opera.