REVIEW BY RICK PENDER

Photo By Sandy Underwood

Eliza Doolittle (Christa Moore) gets a lesson in elocution from Professor Henry Higgins (Neal Benari) in the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's staging of My Fair Lady, opening the 2003-2004 season.

How to make an almost 50-year-old musical new again? The Cincinnati Playhouse has found a good formula with its season-opening production of My Fair Lady: It's "back to the basics."

Instead of an orchestra pit with strings, reeds, horns and percussion -- certainly what Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had in mind when they wrote this lush score with tunes ranging from the lyrical "On the Street Where You Live" to the jaunty "With A Little Bit of Luck" -- two grand pianos fill a small pit at the front of the Playhouse's Marx Theatre thrust stage. We never lose sight of Steven Gross and Henry Palkes, who even don top hats for the posh Ascot racetrack sequence, and their spirited playing keeps the momentum forward and fleet, even though it's almost three hours from start to finish (Act 1 is 80 minutes, Act 2 is 55).

Lerner and Loewe would not have disagreed with this approach: In fact, they created the seldom-used two-piano score to enable more productions. My Fair Lady's popularity (the 1956 Tony for Best Musical, and 2,717 performances in its first Broadway run, not to mention the 1964 film which won multiple Academy Awards) made that unnecessary, but under director Susan Booth, there's a bonus that comes from streamlining: We get back to the musical's intellectual inspiration and foundation, George Bernard Shaw's sardonic play, Pygmalion. With less fuss over production, there's more emphasis on relationships and emotion.

The show, of course, hinges on self-centered Professor Henry Higgins' (Neal Benari) decision to train a lower-class flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (Christa Moore), to speak and act in a more educated way. He browbeats her into refinement, then takes the credit when she succeeds, wounding the sensitive girl who has come to care for him. They are aided and abetted by Higgins' vacuous but kindly friend, Col. Pickering (Russell Leib).

The scenes of Eliza's language training are swift and amusing, as they should be, but the chemistry between Benari's subdued Higgins and Moore's sprightly, waif-like Eliza takes too long to kick in. She is a pleasure to watch throughout -- and her pain at being taken for granted by the egotistical Higgins in Act 2 is most convincing -- but Benari lacks arrogance as the self-assured phonetics teacher. He redeems himself in the self-revelatory final number, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," and Booth's staging of the show's final scene -- often an arguable moment -- nicely captures their new-found respect for each other.

Designer Michael Philippi has echoed the minimalist approach: A simple assemblage of dual-level, wrought iron arches, walkways and white-glass globes, backed by simple illustrations of an airy 1912 London conservatory suffice to set the various scenes. Adding a few pieces of furniture or opening a small trap door to suggest a streetside fire-pit becomes enough.

Booth extends this spartan approach by using only 10 actors, many of whom cover four or five roles. It's an amusing guessing game to recognize how quickly Keith Howard, Howard Kaye, Jeffrey Kuhn and Rebecca Spencer must change from a busker at Covent Garden to a butler at Higgins' home, or from a hoity-toity, upper-class twit at Ascot to a drunken crony of Alfred P. Doolittle (Peter Van Wagner). Linda Stephens demonstrates the special resonance between two women who keep an eye on the irascible Higgins: his housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, and his mother.

Even with reduced forces, Booth assembles some delightful stage pictures: The "Ascot Gavotte," which contrasts upper-class restraint with Eliza's unbridled enthusiasm for a horse race, is especially enjoyable, and Doolittle's mourning his imminent matrimony ("I'm Getting Married in the Morning") feels crowded and joyous. Only the Embassy Ball sequence concluding Act 1 seems underpopulated and short on glamour, which diminishes Eliza's accomplishment, although she looks smashing in a white, glittering gown. (Linda Roethke's costumes are not understated -- and they look great.).

I'd have enjoyed a bit more snap between Higgins and Eliza, but don't be fooled by downsizing: My Fair Lady is a fine, classic musical, in the best sense of the concept.
Grade: B

E-mail Rick Pender

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