‘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. All very nice, but watching it today you do sometimes wonder how this stately three-decker spectacle smashed all records on Broadway and in the West End, and left Rodgers and Hammerstein slack-jawed with admiration.

Opera North’s production of My Fair Lady will give you the answer. You arrive expecting big hats and opulent set pieces. Instead you get a drama that zings off the stage: indelible songs, dialogue that sparks and crackles, and a cast who find meaning in every line. You probably know that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – the 1913 play upon which the show is based – gives My Fair Lady a headstart for intellectual bite. What you might not expect is to hear GBS’s acid one-liners getting laugh after laugh from an audience primed by the songs to take the whole thing in a spirit of open-hearted delight.