Showing posts with label My Fair Lady. Show all posts
Showing posts with label My Fair Lady. Show all posts

Wednesday, 4 December 2024

My Fair Lady - Review

Curve Theatre, Leicester



*****



Music by Frederick Loewe
Lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner
Directed by Nikolai Foster


Molly Lynch

Yet again the good people of Leicester are blessed with the most stunning festive gift from the city’s Curve theatre. This year it is Nikolai Foster’s sumptuous production of My Fair Lady that sparkles.

Molly Lynch, who is no stranger to Foster and Curve following her stunning Betty Schaefer in the venue’s Sunset Boulevard a few years back, now steps up to her rightful place as a leading lady, giving the most powerful yet sensitive interpretation of Eliza Doolitle to have been seen on these shores in years. Lynch has a voice that can capture both power and pathos. We are first treated to her excellence in Wouldn’t It Be Loverly and as her character tumbles into perfect received pronunciation with The Rain In Spain, her development is as seamless and as charming as her voice is sweet. From there it’s into I Could Have Danced All Night and on glancing around the Curve’s audience, the smiles on the audience's faces defined the joy that Lynch was bringing in her take on this, one of musical theatre’s most enigmatic women.

My Fair Lady of course revolves around the relationship between Eliza and Henry Higgins, and with David Seadon-Young’s playing the professor of linguistics the pair are perfectly matched. His is a sensitive take on the emotionally crippled academic and rarely has chauvinism sounded so charming as in Seadon-Young’s interpretation. As he implores the world to fit his view of how things should be, firstly with Why Can’t The English and later with A Hymn To Him, the range of his singing is just delightful. And then with I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face, Seadon unlocks the man’s complexities and vulnerabilities with a heartbreaking depth.

Foster has assembled a company of talent to match the two leads. Minal Patel is in fine form as Colonel Pickering, while Steve Furst keeps the flame of old-fashioned sexism burning brightly with his hilarious take on Alfred Doolittle. Get Me To The Church On Time is one of the canon’s comedy highlights that sets the audience up for the traumatic ups and downs of the story's final act. Djavan Van de Fliert is a marvellously voiced Freddy Eynsford-Hill, while Sarah Moyle playing both Freddy’s mother and Higgins’ housekeeper Mrs Pearce is equally en pointe. The venerable Cathy Tyson as Henry’s wise mother brings the perfect weighting of gravitas to her small but critical role in the evening’s proceedings.

Michael Taylor’s lavish set designs fill the Curve’s vast space with height, depth and ingenuity, Mark Henderson’s lighting complements the visuals perfectly, while out of sight (apart from a delightful centre-stage cameo at the Embassy Ball), George Dyer’s nine-piece band make fine work of the classic score. Jo Goodwin's inspired choreography is at its finest in the company numbers, with Get Me To The Church On Time evolving into a spectacle of perfectly rehearsed movement.

Playing until the new year, My Fair Lady at the Curve is quite possibly the finest show to be found this Christmas. Don’t miss it!


Runs until 4th January 2025
Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Friday, 11 November 2022

My Fair Lady - Review

Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff



*****


Music by Frederick Loewe
Lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner
Directed by Bartlett Sher



Charlotte Kennedy and company


It is rare that a West End production improves on the road, but so it is with Bartlett Sher’s My Fair Lady, touring the UK and Ireland after a short summer residency at London’s Coliseum.

The show, now with Michael Xavier and Charlotte Kennedy playing Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, is a sensational take on the Broadway classic. The two leads fizz with a chemistry that fills the Millenium Centre, their complicated relationship evolving before our eyes. Michael Xavier is one of the country’s finest leading men of his generation and, aside from his top-notch vocal delivery he cracks the complex emotional dysfunctionality of Lerner and Loewe’s Professor.

Kennedy’s Eliza however is the show’s revelation. Not just in her stunning vocal presence, but in how she inhabits every song. Her transformation from cockney Covent Garden flower-girl to powerfully spoken young woman is mesmerising.  Wouldn’t It Be Loverly and I Could Have Danced All Night are long recognised as Eliza’s highlights – here however, not just smashing those all time favourites out of the park, Kennedy grasps the second act cracker of Show Me, transforming it into a fusion of rage, frustration and passion rarely seen on stage. Kennedy’s elegance and presence is equally astonishing, with her entrance just before the interval bejewelled and ballgowned (take a bow costume designer Catherine Zuber) ready for the Embassy Ball, proving literally breathtaking. There is more than a hint of Audrey Hepburn to this Eliza.

Adam Woodyatt makes the delightful transition from Albert Square to Lisson Grove as he takes on the role of Alfred P. Doolittle. Albeit a supporting role, Eliza’s father is a larger than life caricature of London’s working class and it takes a performer of massive character to play the role to its full, with Woodyatt a delight in both voice and persona. John Middleton’s Colonel Pickering makes for a faultless foil to Higgins, while Annie Wensak, stepping up to cover the part of Mrs Pearce on the night of this review is another treat. Tom Liggins as Freddie Eynsford-Hill gives an excellent performance of On The Street Where You Live that only adds to the evening’s delights.

The set design is ingenious, with Michael Yeargan’s scenery working well for a touring production. Londoners – who are often spoilt for cultural choice – have missed out on a local chance to catch this cast. Now touring the regions until April next year, Bartlett Sher’s My Fair Lady is, at last, unmissable musical theatre.


Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Saturday, 16 March 2019

Jasper Britton In Conversation


Jasper Britton

Witness For The Prosecution, Agatha Christie's murder thriller is playing very successfully at London's ingeniously converted County Hall venue. RSC leading man, Jasper Britton heads the latest cast change and as he took over the role of defence barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts he and I chatted about the play and his career... 


Jonathan:    Jasper, tell me about your journey into Witness For The Prosecution?

Jasper:    Well I was doing A Pack of Lies at the Menier and then Lucy Bailey (the director of Witness For The Prosecution) called me. This is the fourth time I've worked with Lucy. She usually phones me at midnight and asks me to start rehearsing the next morning, telling me that she’s “made a terrible mistake casting!”. I'm forever meeting her in bars and in theatres and she says, "Oh I'm directing such and such, and there's a marvellous part for you, you'd be brilliant in it." So she phoned up and said, "Look I'm doing this thing. And we're recasting and it's great fun”

And so we went in one afternoon and she showed me round the whole place. Downstairs at County Hall the company has kind of created a whole backstage area out of nothing and there's a real sense of fun and I just thought this is a happy place to be, a happy fun place and "Well, why not?". And it was a six month contract too which is sort of rare in this day and age.

And then my agent said, "Don't do it, it'll kill you, you'll be performing (at the Menier) while you're rehearsing Witness." And I said, "Well I've done that before at Stratford."  And  she said, "Yes but you're normally in rep and you're… you know…."

And of course she wasn't far off. By the time we got to finishing Pack of Lies and starting Witness, I really was on my knees. I turned up for a photo shoot, I can't even remember it. I look at the photograph, I look like the tiredest man in the world. That period of performing and rehearsing was a month without a day off and 70 to 80 hour weeks. Luckily we were rehearsing at the Jerwood which is only round the corner from the Menier, so it literally was a three minute walk to and from each venue. But bloody hell!

Jonathan:    Was the entire cast replaced for this change over in Witness?

Jasper:    More or less. There are a couple of people in the smaller roles who stayed on, who've been there for a while. And yeah, they are a fantastic bunch. Some of them it's only their first job, but you'd never know it. Their range of skills is absolutely astonishing. And there is a wonderful work ethic. Everybody pulls their weight, even down to the smallest parts.

Jonathan:    In my recent review of the play I noted that there are four of the show’s players who are making their West End debuts and how this speaks volumes for the excellent standard of the current cohort of actors currently entering the profession.

Jasper:    Quite right too and it's very nice of you to big them up like that, because they really do deserve it. And they are all very kind to me and patient with me. It took me a while because I was so tired!

Jonathan:    What strikes me about the play, is that It's the sort of show that the tourist who's not well versed in English literature could go to and thoroughly enjoy as top notch theatre. How does Witness compare with say Shakespeare where there's more potential for interpretation in the verse?

Jasper:    That’s a really good question. I would say that this is absolutely a piece of popular theatre and that's reflected in the breadth of the audience that we get. We get very young people, we get very old people. We get foreign people, we get English people. We get a very different audience to the one that I'm used to working with in what I would describe as subsidised British theatre. The attraction of it, is that it is a popular piece of theatre. And that you don't have to engage your brain too much. But of course people do because they're trying to work out who done it, all the way through.

The challenge of any piece really is that after you've finished rehearsing as it were, I always feel that's when the real work begins. Because the audience teach you so much about the play. And they teach you about what works and what works less well. And they teach you about when they get bored, and they teach you about what they don't believe, and they teach you about what they do believe.

And so the process of performing for me, is always a continuous process of reconsidering, and reworking and finding new inspirations. So I really wanted to find the maverick, like Lucy is a maverick. I wanted to find the maverick in my barrister. And of course it's different to Shakespeare because Shakespeare does all of the work for you.

I remember doing a Simon Gray play in the West End. - Simon taught me so much about acting.- And he said, "Look, it's okay for you to just sit on the sofa and talk. Don't forget, the writer has done the work for you."And those were golden words of advice.

Jonathan:    The last thing that I'd caught you in before this show, (I didn't see you at the Menier) was Scrooge The Musical at Leicester’s Curve in 2017. Before then I hadn't associated you with musical theatre. Where does that heritage comes from?

Jasper:    Right, well, there's a tale!

My dad was the first person to tour Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady in this country from 1964 to 66 (and I was born in 1962).

Jonathan:    Your father is Tony Britton

Jasper:    Yes – and he’s enjoyed an extraordinary career.Being Higgins, touring for two years. And then being a household name on television. I mean he is brilliant. He can do anything really. So as I was growing up, my recollection is, that the record of that was always on the record player.

And then in 1972 he was in a musical called No, No, Nanette at Drury Lane and he used to give me his scripts to draw on the back of because in the old days, before we were green, they would only be printed on one side so you could write notes on the facing side. And he'd just give them to me and I'd draw pictures of ships and God knows what.

But one day I took this script with me to school. I've no idea why. But I put it in my bag and I took it with me and in a history lesson ... I was terrible at history, I found it intensely boring. I took the script out and I started to read it. And very early on in that show is a song called Too Many Rings Around Rosie. And it was sung by Annie Rogers and Teddy Green. And Annie Rogers wore a 1920's flapper dress, green sequined flapper dress with a big feather in her hair, and Teddy Green was wearing a very stylish cream linen suit and a straw boater.

And I'd seen the show, obviously, but what struck me was the lyrics on the page, when I got to the page. There was just the lyrics in block capitals. There were no stage directions, nothing. And as I read the lyrics, I could see in my minds eye, and hear in my minds ear, Teddy and Annie singing and dancing the song. And I loved it. It was my favourite song in the show. And it's actually the thing that made me want to be an actor. It was that moment, reading those lyrics.

A few years later I found myself at a different school, and a man called Jeremy James Taylor turned up. He'd been at university with my English teacher. And they decided, because the school play had been defunct for some years, they decided, "Hey why don't we do a school play."

Jeremy was an associate director at the Young Vic at the time and he’d had this idea about a boy player in Elizabethan times in London called Salomon Pavey who had sadly died when he was only 12 years old. But he was very famous for playing old men, oddly. So they thought, "Right, why don't we explore that." So over nine months they wrote for us, this musical which is now called The Ballad of Salomon Pavey - what they described as a ballad opera.

We performed it in a vast marquee, I mean a really big marquee, on the lawn at my prep school and it was magical. And then we took it to the Edinburgh Festival that summer and we won a Fringe First! The following year we did it at the Young Vic for a fortnight to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and that production turned out to be the first from what is now known as The National Youth Music Theatre that Jeremy subsequently set up.

As time went on I became an actor and I went to the RSC in 1992 where they put me in The Beggars Opera which had 74 songs in that version with the brilliant Ilona Sekacz having done the arrangements. It was mega.

The thing though that I really want to do, is to play Henry Higgins. And I'm going to drop a card to Cameron Macintosh and say, "Next time you do it, would you just put my name in your hat." I only have two ambitions really in my life. One is to play Henry Higgins. And the other is to play Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. I played Willy at the age of 17 at school, and I love that play!


Witness For The Prosecution is booking until March 2020

Photo credit: Ellie Kurtz