This ‘My Fair Lady’ revival knows what time it is
In his remount of the classic, director Bartlett Sher sees Eliza as a feminist
When the revival of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” touched down on Broadway in 2018 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, more than a few eyebrows were raised about remounting a musical with problematic gender politics. After all, in this 1956 musical, a linguistics professor, Henry Higgins, bullies a young woman, Eliza Doolittle, while sculpting her from a downtrodden flower girl to a well-spoken lady who could pass as high-born. Isn’t Higgins’s treatment of Eliza and the story of a woman needing to be rescued by a man painfully regressive in a 21st-century context?
Even Julie Andrews, who played Eliza in the original stage version, told an interviewer in 2018 that the show was indeed “very sexist” and that “young women in particular will and should find it hard.”
Boston audiences can mull over these questions when the national tour of “My Fair Lady,” adapted from that award-winning Lincoln Center Theater production, arrives at the Citizens Bank Opera House April 18-30, presented by Broadway in Boston. All the songs from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s indelible score are here, from “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “The Rain in Spain” to “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
For Bartlett Sher, who helmed the Lincoln Center production and helped oversee this tour with associate director Samantha Saltzman, the key was to go back and investigate George Bernard Shaw’s “original intentions” in writing the 1913 play “Pygmalion” and its 1938 screen adaptation, upon which “My Fair Lady” is based.
The Irish playwright didn’t intend to write a frothy romance between people from two different worlds. At the time, women still did not have the right to vote, and Shaw sought to create a play that would help advocate for women’s suffrage and serve as a critique of Britain’s rigid class system. “Shaw was at the leading edge of thinking about politics, women’s rights, issues of sexuality,” Sher says via Zoom.
Despite Higgins’s mistreatment of Eliza, “My Fair Lady” was making a feminist argument, Sher says, just as Shaw originally did in “Pygmalion.”
“You watch this story of this young girl who works her way up from the bottom of society all the way to the top, purely through her own accomplishments of language and training, and it proves that those things are not born to a certain group or passed on through some hierarchy,” Sher says. “Shaw was making a political argument that class is imposed, that it’s bestowed through privilege, through hierarchy, through entitlement, through wealth, and that it’s a false structure for social improvement.”
To bolster that theme, Sher added a few lines from “Pygmalion” into the “My Fair Lady” text. The effect of those adjustments in dialogue and staging underlines the fact that Eliza, played by Madeline Powell on the tour, is a strong, powerful personality in her own right, and she goes toe-to-toe with the brusque, misogynistic Higgins (Jonathan Grunert). She’s a woman, audiences sometimes forget, of ambition and agency.
When they first meet outside the Covent Garden opera house, where Eliza is selling flowers, Higgins mocks her thick Cockney accent. But the cunning Eliza takes advantage of their chance encounter and shows up on his doorstep the next day requesting elocution lessons, which she hopes will land her a job as an assistant in a flower shop. “Eliza sees him and goes, ‘He can help me.’ She’s the one who’s actually pushing to get things done,” Sher says.
At first, Higgins dismisses her as “a draggle-tailed guttersnipe.” But then he wagers his friend Colonel Pickering (John Adkison) that, within six months, he’ll be able to pass off Eliza as a duchess after tutoring her in language, phonetics, and etiquette. While Higgins is pompous and disparaging, Eliza endures his slights in order to pull herself up and out of her situation. “From the very beginning, she seizes that opportunity,” Powell says. “She knows that’s the key to her finding a better quality of life.”
Powell, who grew up in Texas and graduated from Oklahoma City University two years ago, acknowledges feeling the pressure of playing an iconic character, one first made famous by Andrews on Broadway and then brought to life onscreen by Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 film (both opposite Rex Harrison).
“I know how much the character means to other women. But Bart really encouraged me to find my own Eliza,” Powell says. “He gave me permission to have some fun with it rather than feeling like it had to be handled delicately.”
While there are other strong female roles in the musical theater canon, Powell says Eliza stands out for her determination to pull herself out of her difficult circumstances, which include a troubling past with an emotionally abusive father. “We hardly ever see women that are written to be as outspoken, bold, and strong-willed as she is.”
While a budding friendship develops between Eliza and Higgins and their interactions soften, Powell stresses that romance isn’t the point of the story. “We often see women pining after the man, and all the songs have to do with the men they’re in love with,” Powell says. “But her songs deal with the knowledge that she’s desperately trying to acquire, the things that she’s frustrated about, and things that she’s wanting, rather than the man that she’s wanting.”
Powell notes that some audience members have objected to Eliza’s independence. “I’ve gotten some e-mails and letters, mostly from men, who want to know why there isn’t a kiss in the show and wish that Eliza was more in love with Higgins,” she says. “They feel like we missed the point of the story, when in actuality, they’re the ones who have totally missed it!”
Still, she and Sher have discussed how a true friendship develops between Eliza and Higgins. “But it’s not about them falling in love,” Powell says. “It’s about the love and care they have for one another and their desperation to understand each other.”
Powell recalls that Saltzman, the tour’s director, encouraged her to reflect on the aspects of Eliza that made her “uncomfortable” and “to lean into the grittier parts of her, when she’s having to fight for what she wants. She kept telling me, ‘I think you’re more like Eliza than you think you are.’ ”
Indeed, playing Eliza has inspired Powell both professionally and personally. “As a young woman right out of college trying to find myself and figure out where my boundaries are as an adult, it’s been a very freeing experience,” she says. “It’s almost like she’s given me permission to stand up for myself in those same ways that Eliza does. I’m just learning so many lessons from her.”