Isn’t this loverly? ‘My Fair Lady’ arrives at last in Chicago
When “My Fair Lady” finally opens at the Cadillac Palace Theatre this week, it will have been a long journey so far for the stuffy professor and the young Cockney flower seller.
The touring production of director Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center revival has had its share of delays due to COVID-19. To recap: This particular “My Fair Lady” first opened on Broadway in April 2018 and earned a host of Tony Award nominations, winning for costume design. Tribune critic Chris Jones found Sher’s version of the Lerner and Loewe tuner a bit chilly, particularly in the central relationship: “As played by Harry Hadden-Paton, Higgins seems utterly incapable of any kind of love separated from his own privileged ego,” he wrote at the time. “You struggle to see even a moment when he shows any romantic interest in Eliza.” Audiences want and expect their “Fair Ladys” to have a certain lightheartedness and sense of romance, he wrote, what with numbers like “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
Nonetheless, it played for more than a year, closing the following July with a North American tour launching in December 2019. A few months later, that tour was halted by the pandemic, as was famously everything on stage anywhere. It resumed in September 2021 in Houston and is slated to play in the Loop through July 10, arriving from Cleveland and heading next to Detroit. The tour has all fresh faces since Broadway, of course.
In Chicago, the flower seller Eliza Doolittle will be played by Shereen Ahmed, previously an understudy for the role in New York. She’s also played Esther in an off-Broadway production of “Meet Me in St. Louis” by Irish Repertory Theatre and was in NBC’s “New Amsterdam.” Laird Mackintosh plays Professor Henry Higgins; he previously was the Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway, as well as John Utterson in “Jekyll and Hyde” and Mr. Banks in “Mary Poppins,” and has appeared several times at the Stratford Festival in Canada.
It’s not the only familiar title on a Chicago stage this summer. Next at the Cadillac Palace is “Jesus Christ Superstar” from July 19 (and “Lion King” will be there in November). It’s not a musical, of course, but Jones recommends “Steel Magnolias,” now at the Drury Lane Theatre.
“My Fair Lady” plays June 28 to July 10 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; 800-7752000 and www.broadwayin chicago.com