4 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘My Fair Lady' transformed into a love triangle? S.F. Playhouse shows how
If 'My Fair Lady' is open-ended as written, San Francisco Playhouse just walked through that door into a whole new musical.
Fight me, purists, but the possibilities are all right there, in the way Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's masterpiece flouts the expectations of the well-trod enemies-to-lovers arc. Domineering phoneticist Henry Higgins and his feisty pupil Eliza Doolittle don't conclude on earnest declarations, back-bending kisses and a happily ever after. In the last line, after a fight, all Henry says is 'Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?'— which various directors have wordlessly steered in different directions.
In Bartlett Sher's magnificent revival, which toured BroadwaySF's Orpheum Theatre four years ago, Eliza walked offstage at the end, a move that echoed Nora's famous door slam at the end of 'A Doll's House.' But in Bill English's production, which opened Wednesday, July 9, at San Francisco Playhouse, the ambiguity comes earlier, to intriguing effect.
This time, when Henry (Adam Magill) first encounters Eliza (Jillian A. Smith) outside the opera and makes a bet with Colonel Pickering (Brady Morales-Woolery) that he can pass this flower girl off as duchess by scouring her of her Cockney accent, the sparks are more diffuse.
Call it 'My Fair Lady' by way of 'Challengers.'
It's not crazy to explore whether the feeling between Henry and Pickering is more than old-chap backslapping. The two keep referring to themselves as confirmed bachelors, and there's a whole song called 'Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?' But Eliza's tangled up in all the hormones too. When the three collapse on a chaise after Eliza finally speaks with Received Pronunciation and servant Mrs. Pearce (Heather Orth) stumbles upon their knot of wayward limbs, it looks like she's interrupted a ménage à trois.
Still, if anyone feels puppy love here, it's Pickering, thanks to Morales-Woolery's pleading eyes and pregnant pauses, and Freddy (Nicholas Tabora), who falls for Eliza during her first bumbling public attempt at uppercrust cosplay.
In other productions, when Eliza and Henry face off over his callous treatment of her, the subtext is that each wants the other to admit a weakness that's at least partly sexual. This time, while that flicker never entirely dies, it's more about the fun of debating an equal in intellect and fearlessness. When they ask what we owe each other as humans and why we let caste dictate the answer, they're two people honestly trying to figure out what they are to each other in an Edwardian London that has no name for their relationship.
Henry veers from high dudgeon to babyish self-pity like he's getting tempest-tossed, but Magill navigates the gnarly waves like a master surfer, each new thrash of feeling perfectly calibrated to show what's changed from the last.
Meanwhile, Smith brings a sprite's mischief and an easygoing self-assurance to Eliza. When with her small stature she makes Magill's tall Henry flinch, her tittering triumph is like David's over Goliath.
If singing doesn't always make Loewe's golden melodies gleam, plenty else compensates. Abra Berman's costumes are refreshingly unshackled to those of the 1964 Audrey Hepburn film. Here Eliza wears trousers underneath some of her open-front skirts with tiers of ruffles, suggesting how she's ready to mount a steed and chart her own path.
The supporting cast excels. Chachi Delgado radiates joy in movement executing Nicole Helfer's choreography. As Mrs. Pearce, Orth steals scenes with single crisp choices — a retracted neck, lowered eyelids, a bouncy step. Jomar Tagatac, playing Eliza's dustman father Alfred, brings head-to-toe understanding of who his unapologetically self-interested character is, what he wants, how to get it and how that changes beat by beat. He mimes making sweet, sweet love to a broom and asks an audience member to marry him with equal conviction.
With its witty, word-drunk lyrics and thirst-quenching songs, 'My Fair Lady' is always worth a revisit. What might strike you acutely this time around, however, is just how much more unlikely it would be for someone as impoverished as Eliza to make a similar class leap today. When a glowed-up Eliza tries to revisit her old back-alley stomping grounds, her former peers instinctively understand that they're not supposed to be around her. In our era, it's less about accent, but those caste walls seem all the thicker and higher.
