Review: My Fair Lady 'a smashing, absolutely dashing spectacle'

‘What a smashing, absolutely dashing spectacle’ – not the Ascot opening day but this gripping, ‘absolutely ripping’ production of Lerner and Loewe’s hit musical

It begins in bustling Covent Garden with street musicians riffing, traders hawking, flower sellers weaving through the opera-goers spilling out into the night.

Flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Simbi Akande) is literally upset when a gentleman – Freddie (Alfie Blackwell)  – stumbles into her, sending bunches of violets tumbling. She is even more outraged to be told that a bloke behind a pillar is scribbling down her ‘every blessed word.’

The bloke is Professor Henry Higgins (Nadim Naaman), a linguistics expert who captures Eliza’s Cockney vowels and despairs in song – Why Can’t the English? – at what he sees as the national plague of sloppy diction.

Like a Sherlock Holmes of the spoken word, Higgins places each person in the crowd by their speech alone, noting Eliza’s ‘disgusting and depressing’ syllables and discovering that one interested bystander is fellow phoneticist Colonel Pickering (Jo Servi).

Higgins drops coins to the flower seller as well as a mention of his address as he saunters off with Pickering, inviting him to stay as a houseguest.

Eliza rejoices in her windfall and imagines a softer, warmer life, singing the sweetly wistful Wouldn't It Be Loverly?

The harmonies have barely echoed away when Eliza's dustman father, Alfred P. Doolittle, lumbers in, looking for a bit of money. Thanks to A Little Bit of Luck, he gets it. This percussive, spoons-and-stomps rendition is one of two standout numbers in a show already teeming with great songs – the other also belongs to Alfred.

Stanley Holloway was sublime as the philosophising dustman in the Oscar-winning 1964 film version of My Fair Lady (not too mention Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn and Marni Nixon) but Mark Moraghan makes the role his own with dustbin-loads of charm and cheek. 

When Eliza turns up at the professor’s gracious home, seeking elocution lessons so she can talk ‘more genteel’ and secure a job in a flower shop.

Higgins wagers Pickering that, within six months he will enable her to pass for a lady at the Embassy Ball and the story unfolds from that bold bet:  strangled vowels are painstakingly untangled and a string of wonderful songs mark the way.

There’s Eliza’s gleeful vengeance in Just You Wait, the joyful breakthrough of The Rain in Spain, the servants soothing tones belonging with an effervescent Eliza in I Could Have Danced All Night, and the buttoned-up hilarity of the Ascot Gavotte, gorgeously costumed and exquisitely staged.

Love-struck Freddie falls for Eliza at the races and later pours his heart into On the Street Where You Live. And then there’s the glorious, full-throttle Get Me to the Church on Time, Alfred’s second triumph and the production’s roof-lifter.

Sophie-Louise Dann (who deftly doubles as housekeeper Mrs Pearce and Henry’s mother) swaggers in with a music-hall strut as Burlington Bertie in the same number, another delight in a show rich in detail and fun.

Hats off to director and co-choreographer Joseph Pitcher and all the creative team for a show that sounds sumptuous, looks beautiful and keeps the laughter rolling.

Like Eliza’s aunt with the gin, the audience just lapped it up.