‘Zings off the stage’: My Fair Lady, at Leeds Playhouse, reviewed

If you want to kill a musical, make it into a movie. Cats, Phantom of the Opera, South Pacific… cinema history is littered with dud remakes of world-conquering theatrical sensations. But it’s almost worse when a film musical succeeds on its own terms, and – like a mask eating into the face – proceeds to write over the original show in the collective memory. I once saw a newspaper describe a West End revival of The Sound of Music as a ‘stage version of the classic movie’, which is a bit like describing Pride and Prejudice as a novelisation of the hit BBC drama.

The prime exhibit is Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, which for most of us now means the 1964 film – that gorgeous Technicolor pageant which jettisons the show’s original star, Julie Andrews, in favour of Audrey Hepburn, purely for the visuals.