Loverly

Trinity Rep's My Fair Lady is an ensemble triumph

by Jeffrey Gantz

MY FAIR LADY. Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Loewe. Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Set by David Jenkins. Lighting by Amy Appleyard. Costumes by Devon Painter. Sound by Robert Pemberton. Choreography by Kelli Wicke Davis. With Timothy Crowe, Rachael Warren, Fred Sullivan Jr., Bob Colonna, Janice Duclos, Michael Hance, and Barbara Meek. At Trinity Repertory Company through May 21.

If there's a bulletproof Broadway musical, it's Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady. Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, it has what most musicals don't, a probing story line (man creates his fantasy woman but she still goes her own way), plus a score to die for: from "Why Can't the English" and "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" to "Just You Wait, 'Enry 'Iggins" and "I Could Have Danced All Night," there's not one number you can't leave the theater singing. All that's needed is a decent Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, and Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl he proposes to turn into a lady; and in its current production Trinity Repertory Company obliges.

Yet though Timothy Crowe and Rachel Warren are affecting leads, this is an ensemble triumph whose stars are the set and the chorus. My Fair Lady's multiple settings -- Covent Garden, Tottenham Court Road, Professor Higgins's study, Ascot, the Embassy Ball, Mrs. Higgins's conservatory -- are way beyond Trinity's means, as is a full orchestra, so David Jenkins makes a virtue of necessity by dispensing with the set altogether, nesting a pair of grand pianos at center stage and creating several catwalk levels, one with a hint of wrought-iron fence to suggest Professor Higgins's genteel Wimpole Street digs. Most of the action takes place in front of the piano duo, where your imagination (prompted by Devon Painter's spiffy period costumes) fills in the details. And the chorus, doing quick-change numbers before your eyes, fills out the various group roles: Eliza's cockney friends, Professor Higgins's students, his servants (Buckingham Palace should have so many), the toffs and swells at Ascot and at the Embassy Ball. The camaraderie helps compensate for the missing orchestra -- at times the chorus is the orchestra, providing a welcome vocalise accompaniment to the two pianos -- and the thrust stage creates a sense of intimacy. With "My Fair Lady" up in lights against the rear wall, you're never likely to forget you're watching a (mostly loverly) theater production.

Rachael Warren's Eliza is lovable as well as loverly: with her squeals of delight and outrage, her sarcastic curtseys, her chocolate fixation, and the sensuous way she lolls on the piano, even turning a page for the pianist, she's an uninhibited little girl who turns into an uninhibited lady. Her cockney accent is variable but mostly good; so is her singing, though it moves uneasily between beauteous and belting, and when her speaking voice hits the upper register, particularly in the first act, she's often unintelligible. Timothy Crowe's Professor Higgins is younger, less professorial, and more irritable than the standard that Rex Harrison set, and he underlines the cultural, social, and personal imperialism by which Henry tries to make Eliza over in his own image -- as she puts it, "You're a great bully, you are." It's a tougher, entirely legitimate interpretation, but I wish he were more forceful and articulate in his singing -- too much of it slides by without Harrison's delightfully bemused exasperation (in the "Hebrews do it backwards/Which is absolutely frightening" line of "Why Can't the English," for example, "frightening" goes for nothing).

Fred Sullivan Jr. is a sly, exuberant, engaging Alfred P. Doolittle; I found him just a little cute for my taste. (Alfred should feel the blood of English kings like Ælfred the Great running in his veins -- indeed, the joke on Higgins, and perhaps on Shaw, is that a thousand years ago Ælfred's diphthong-clotted West Saxon dialect, the ancestor of cockney speech, was standard English.) He's an audience grabber all the same. As Colonel Pickering, Bob Colonna (stepping in on short notice for William Damkoehler, who suffered a mild heart attack during previews) is faultless, a good-hearted Watson to Crowe's prickly Holmes. Janice Duclos maintains a similarly high stiff-upper-lip standard as Mrs. Pearce, the professor's housekeeper (though she's happy to accept the chocolates Eliza slips her); Barbara Meek's sassy-but-tender Mrs. Higgins seems modeled on Della Reese in Touched by a Angel; and if Michael Hance lacks aristocratic stature and credibility as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, that's partly because the musical never comes to grips with the character.

Despite the snazzy pianistics from Jay Atwood and Tim Robertson (and some support from a couple of violins), I missed hearing an orchestra playing Frederick Loewe's gorgeous score. But under Trinity associate artistic director Amanda Dehnert, this My Fair Lady almost seems to direct itself. Like that anemone-like knot of aristos who thrill to the running of the Ascot opening race with scarcely a raised eyebrow, Dehnert makes it look easy.