My Fair Lady? It’s just like Meghan’s life
Asumptuous production of the musical my Fair Lady will arrive in the West End next year with some crucial updates for modern audiences. there will be no ‘old man’ to play professor Henry Higgins singing the Rain In spain with 19-year-old flower girl Eliza Doolittle, because that would be ‘creepy’, says the show’s celebrated director.
Instead, Bartlett sher wants Downton Abbey star Harry Hadden-paton, 40, who he directed in the glorious Broadway revival of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe show three years ago, to play the part at the London Coliseum in may.
‘It would be wonderful if it could be Harry,’ sher told me from New York. ‘someone like Harry,’ he added ‘represents who Higgins really should be. He shouldn’t be an old man. What exacerbates the abuse of the piece is this older man preying on this young girl whereas Higgins in the original script couldn’t have been more than 40.’
sher insisted that Rex Harrison as an older interpretaton of the linguistic expert in the original 1956 show, opposite Julie Andrews, and with Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 film is: ‘Creepy. Awful. We can’t do that.’
But Harrison’s casting became the tradition, sher said. ‘some older actor would take on this role and I’m not directing it that way just because it’s really not in the script and it does change it into something different.’
Hadden-paton, who portrayed the Queen’s private secretary martin Charteris, with Claire Foy as the monarch, in the first two seasons of the Crown, won a tony nomination as Higgins alongside Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Diana Rigg, in her last stage performance, as mrs Higgins, his mother.
the actor has just opened in new Lincoln Center show Flying over sunset but sher hopes that he would be available to play the Coliseum where performances begin on may 7. ‘He’s sort of the ideal for me,’ sher told me.
HE SAID the search for an Eliza and other principal roles will start within weeks. other parts for what he said would be a multi-cultural cast will begin in January when he’s in London to rehearse to Kill A mockingbird with Rafe spall.
‘It could be very interesting in our era to see this show completely differently following the kind of change we’ve all been through, especially in a place like England where you’ve had a meghan markle come into the Royal Family and go through it,’ he said. ‘the class stuff there [in my Fair Lady] is very vivid and very clear’ and audiences are ‘super sensitive to what is required to move up to a different class, to have different opportunities’.
Class is key, he argued, because while ‘issues of race, equality, inclusion and diversity are all important, they’re always a little bit connected to class’.
producer James Nederlander, who has the stage rights to the show, has wanted to bring my Fair Lady to London for years. Cameron mackintosh and trevor Nunn did the last major revival more than 20 years ago.
I saw sher’s production in New York and it’s a spectacular version packed with classic songs, including Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, but he has added in some of the screenplay George Bernard shaw wrote for the 1938 film adapatation of pygmalion, the source for the story.