After listening to the luscious renditions of “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where You Live” in Arena Stage’s often tunefully adept if dramatically inert revival of “My Fair Lady,” you may never feel worthy of singing them in the shower again. Manna Nichols and Nicholas Rodriguez, the Eliza Doolittle and Freddie Eynsford-Hill of director Molly Smith’s new production, apply to their vocal performances a show-tune shimmer that does thorough justice to two of the musical’s beloved standards.
But the rush one experiences when these actors hit their high notes fails to flare at any other moment of this uninspired evening in Arena’s flagship Fichandler Stage. The sparkling score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe retains much of its fizz, courtesy of the 13-piece orchestra under Paul Sportelli’s crisp command. And here and there, a performer in costume designer Judith Bowden’s gorgeous Victorian finery and orchid-evoking hats shows us how it’s done, a feat accomplished most winningly by Catherine Flye, as a wry and wonderfully wise Mrs. Higgins.
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Arena Stage’s production of My Fair Lady is running now through January 6. Artistic Director Molly Smith’s production features such iconic numbers as “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “The Rain in Spain” and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” with Manna Nichols making her Arena debut as Eliza alongside noted Canadian actor Benedict Campbell as Higgins.
Yet in the cockney numbers that should supply “My Fair Lady” with its earthy exuberance and, even more essentially, in the romantically charged war between flinty speech professor Henry Higgins (Benedict Campbell) and frisky flower girl Eliza, the show comes across as in need of nourishment. “Get Me to the Church on Time” can usually be counted on to give Act 2 its effervescence. Here, as presided over by James Saito’s utterly anemic Alfred P. Doolittle, the song runs out of steam as the ensemble runs around quite literally in circles.
Smith scored a noteworthy success with another American musical classic, the “Oklahoma!” that opened Arena’s refurbished home in the fall 2010 and proved such a smash that it was brought back the following summer. The freshness of that enterprise reflected Smith’s affinity for the musical’s hearty frontier spirit and for the common cause embodied by the rough-hewn types making their way in the burgeoning territories of a young nation.
With Shavian characters defined so consciously by class and manner — the 1956 musical is based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” now being presented by the Washington Stage Guild — “My Fair Lady” does not readily yield to re-interpretation. Henry is an elitist and misogynist and Eliza is fiery and unschooled. When their edges become too soft, when you cannot fully credit Henry’s cruelty or Eliza’s rawness, the magic in the musical’s love and transformation stories is lost.
I didn’t buy for one minute the beautiful, refined Nichols as a guttersnipe in need of a makeover or the benignly professorial Campbell as a cold brute in Savile Row tailoring. That partly may explain why the first hour or so of this production is leaden; when this Henry sings “I’m an Ordinary Man,” the title words ring too true. In the long dialogue scenes between them, there’s no igniting of the flame. (When you’re bored, you begin noticing little things, as in, why do Campbell’s eyeglasses look as if they belong to an English academic circa 2009?)
Preview of “Eveningland,” a collaborative work by D.C.-based contemporary dance company Christopher K. Morgan & Artists and New York’s Skybetter and Associates.
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