GENDER POLITICS TAKES THE STAGE
The national tour of ‘My Fair Lady’ finally arrives at the Bushnell after COVID-induced postponement
To understand how Shereen Ahmed can morph herself from an uncouth flower girl into a cultured woman of society in the role of Eliza Doolittle, all you need to do is browse her resume. Although she is now starring in the national tour of “My Fair Lady,” which finally arrives at The Bushnell March 8 to 13 after a COVID-induced postponement, her training ground for the part was in her home state of Maryland, where she played such outspoken, intelligent characters as Maria in “The Sound of Music,” Anita in “West Side Story,” Anna in “The King and I,” Christine in “Phantom of the Opera” and Princess Fiona in “Shrek: The Musical.”
But her Eliza was for Broadway in Playing the indomitable Eliza, the the major revival of Frederick Loewe Cockney street vendor who dreams of and Alan Jay Lerner’s masterwork in escaping poverty, is “all based on the 2018-2019. Ahmed understudied Eliza language,” Ahmed says during a recent and also played numerous smaller roles phone interview with The Courant. in the long-running production. “I’ve always gravitated toward accents.
My father is from Egypt and has a heavy accent. I’ve always had an ear for it.”
Ahmed is the first woman of color to play Eliza Doolittle on Broadway and on London’s West End, but she says “my background doesn’t inform Eliza. Eliza’s background informs Eliza. Eliza is an English girl who grew up on the streets. I’m an Egyptian American, and I thought a lot about what does that mean for me? My father grew up poor. I also took a lot of inspiration from people around me.”
Defining moments for Eliza, as Shereen sees it, come in the songs “The Rain in Spain” and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” when “the audience sees her superpower, which is her voice.”
“My Fair Lady” is a bonafide American musical-theater classic, based on the play “Pygmalion” by British playwright George Bernard Shaw. It also has strong Connecticut connections. It had its world premiere at the Shubert in New Haven on Feb. 4, 1956, for a triumphant series of out-of-town try-out performances five weeks before it was on Broadway. The director of this revival, Bartlett Sher, was the associate artistic director of Hartford Stage in the mid-1990s, and is now a Broadway powerhouse who helmed major revivals of “Fiddler on the Roof ” and “The King” (both of which toured to The Bushnell), and also directed Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed new adaptation of
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“I worked closely with Bart,” Ahmed says. “We had very deep conversations about the challenges of the show. People romanticize and fantasize ‘My Fair Lady’ in a way it’s not meant to be at all.”
In the wrong hands, she suggests, the relationship between Eliza and Prof. Henry Higgins (played on the tour by Laird Mackintosh) can play into, rather than openly question, issues of male dominance.
“It’s about the challenging circumstances of gender politics in the early 1900s and now” she emphasizes. “It shows how important reviving old musicals is.”
On a bet, phonetics specialist Higgins sets about turning Eliza into a well-spoken woman that can fit into society circles, a project she accepts as a way of improving her job prospects. Their relationship is not intended to be romantic; Eliza has that with a young man admirer named Freddy (played by Sam Simahk).
Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle “never sing a song together, or talk about a romantic future together,” Ahmed says. “Theirs is an intellectual relationship.
We are really hearkening back to what was originally intended. We are getting back to Shaw.”
The tour was originally scheduled to be in Hartford in late April of 2021. The downtime from the pandemic was “a wild experience,” Ahmed says. “The transition was very different from when you’re ending a role and then doing it in a different place. I had 18 months off. I didn’t work much. I didn’t create much. And when I came back to [‘My Fair Lady’] I wanted to approach it in a different way, because I have changed so much.
“When we started again,
Bart and I, and the company, changed a few things. We had a table read in August and some lines were landing differently. The misogyny in Higgins landed differently. We were playing in Houston, and there were women’s rights protests there at the time, and there were visceral reactions to the show. We began digging deeper than we had before.”
As Eliza herself puts it, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.”