My Fair Lady

[edjames]

Replacement in lead role announced:

 

Laura Benanti to Join ‘My Fair Lady’ on Broadway

• Aug. 23, 2018
  

Henry Higgins will have to grow accustomed to a new face: the Tony-winning actress Laura Benanti is joining the cast of “My Fair Lady” as Eliza Doolittle.

 

Ms. Benanti, a favorite of audiences and critics, will step into the role on Oct. 23, succeeding Lauren Ambrose, who is leaving to shoot a television show. Ms. Ambrose’s final performance will be Oct. 21.

 

The current Broadway revival of “My Fair Lady,” directed by Bartlett Sher, has been running since March at Lincoln Center Theater, where it opened to outstanding reviews. It has also proved to be popular, grossing more than $1 million a week.

 

Ms. Ambrose, best known for her work on the television show “Six Feet Under,” received a Tony nomination for “My Fair Lady.” She is departing to shoot a series being produced for Apple by M. Night Shyamalan.

 

Ms. Benanti is a five-time Tony nominee who won in 2008, for “Gypsy.” Recently she has achieved wider recognition for her impersonation of Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

 

Ms. Benanti, like Ms. Ambrose, will play the role seven times a week, opposite Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins, through Feb. 17. On Tuesday nights, Kerstin Anderson will play Eliza.

[edjames]

It should be noted that Ms. Ambrose HAS NOT been performing seven times a week. It was announced earlier this summer that Ms. Ambrose would not be performing in the Sunday matinee performances.

Diana Rigg Concerned Lauren Ambrose Is Not Willing to Destroy Her Voice for My Fair Lady

By Jackson McHenry

Sing out, Lauren!

 

In order to protect her voice, Lauren Ambrose is ducking out of the Sunday matinee performances of My Fair Lady. She has young kids and is playing Eliza Doolittle, a role that nearly destroyed Julie Andrews, so this seems fairly reasonable, though certainly a disappointment to anyone who bought tickets to see her Tony-nominated performance. It is also a major disappointment to Dame Diana Rigg, who plays Henry Higgins’s mother, and who decided to air her grievances about it

In an email — and we shudder at the thought of anyone getting an email from Diana Rigg — obtained by the Post, Rigg wrote, “I learnt, courtesy of a newspaper, that our leading lady will not be appearing in future Sunday matinees. It is time managements put their audiences first and insist on the old adage, slightly adapted by me, ‘The show must go on — with ALL principals.’” (Impeccable em-dash use from the dame.)When the Post called her up, Rigg stood by her statement, complaining about the work ethic of a younger generation of actors, and pointing out that when she did Medea in 1994, she busted a vocal cord in rehearsals and moved on. “There was a note in the spectrum of my voice that I could not hit. No sound would come out,” she said. “So I had to reorchestrate all those speeches and arias to avoid that note. It was a fascinating exercise in learning how to keep going.” Kids these days, with their avocado toast and their functioning vocal cords!

[bostonman]

In an email — and we shudder at the thought of anyone getting an email from Diana Rigg — obtained by the Post, Rigg wrote, “I learnt, courtesy of a newspaper, that our leading lady will not be appearing in future Sunday matinees. It is time managements put their audiences first and insist on the old adage, slightly adapted by me, ‘The show must go on — with ALL principals.’” (Impeccable em-dash use from the dame.)When the Post called her up, Rigg stood by her statement, complaining about the work ethic of a younger generation of actors, and pointing out that when she did Medea in 1994, she busted a vocal cord in rehearsals and moved on. “There was a note in the spectrum of my voice that I could not hit. No sound would come out,” she said. “So I had to reorchestrate all those speeches and arias to avoid that note. It was a fascinating exercise in learning how to keep going.” Kids these days, with their avocado toast and their functioning vocal cords!

 

This really should be an article from The Onion. Much as I have admired the formidable Dame Rigg, she's gone cuckoo. Nothing is worth vocal cord injuries, and she should know better than to suggest the show is more important than ones' vocal health.

 

Mrs. Higgins is a small (though potentially scene-stealing) role, and it's a privilege to have her in this production. But she should be nurturing and encouraging her younger colleagues, not asking them to kill their voices.

 

I may go try to see this production with Ms. Benanti in November, when I'm in NYC for a weekend. I'm hoping Rigg will be out by then. Sorry...

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Benanti is going to kill in this. Already bought a ticket.

 

Rigg will be out by then. She's being replaced by Rosemary Harris (who is awesome).

[bostonman]

Benanti is going to kill in this. Already bought a ticket.

 

Rigg will be out by then. She's being replaced by Rosemary Harris (who is awesome).

 

I bet Harris will be awesome - as will Benanti.

 

There was a US tour of the Mackintosh London production about a decade ago, in which the late great Marni Nixon played Mrs. Higgins. I didn't think all that much of the tone of the production (or the "Stomp"-like rewriting of the dance numbers, etc), but Nixon was fantastic.

[BroadwayDave]

This is a view from my seat last weekend when I was over in NYC to see the show...

[BroadwayDave]

Picked up a few new souvenirs...

[bostonman]

Another classic, beautiful James McMullan poster design...but this time I fail to see what his drawing really has to do with the show. It's way too busy. (I wasn't very pleased with the Carousel revival logo either - it's as if the show takes place in Greece instead of Maine, lol.)

[N13]

I have a copy of a live performance from Iconic Arts. The quality is excellent. LOVED the production. Surprisingly, I found Harry Hadden-Paton to be an improvement over Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins. It is the first production that I have enjoyed since I saw the original road show with Anne Rodgers in 1950 something in Los Angeles. The others were all disappointing. (Except the movie!)

[N13]

 

She's being replaced by Rosemary Harris (who is awesome).

 

Rosemary Harris gave the most memorable performance I have seen on Broadway in 60 years: Eleanor of Aquitane in "Lion in Winter" with Robert Preston (who was also magnificent!). It took me three viewings before I could even begin to appreciate Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in the movie.

[foxy]

Today I saw the show for a second time. I was happily surprised to get a center row orchestra seat in row K at tkts for $119. Several understudies were in the cast but I really wanted to see Lauren Ambrose again before she leaves. Her voice is stronger and even more beautiful than when I saw the production the first time. She was wonderful. I’d highly recommend the show to anyone who hasn’t seen it.

[edjames]

NYTimes re-reviewed the new cast today and deemed it very worthy.

 

Review: ‘My Fair Lady,’ Illuminated With New Stars

Theater’s calling card is that it’s live, but there’s plenty of counter-evidence. Big musicals are often Exhibit A, with their massive machinery, thin books, prerecorded segments and timed-to-the-second routines. Don’t pause with emotion or put your foot amiss lest you fall behind the click track or get run over by a kick line.

All the more satisfying, then, when a musical not only lives in the moment but also changes and grows over time. Such is the case with the revival of “My Fair Lady” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater — still evolving with new stars after 10 months and $50 million in sales.

Upon its opening last April, it was already a plush and thrilling production, befitting Lincoln Center Theater’s tradition of treating classic musicals as both spectacle and living text. While honoring Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 original, the director Bartlett Sher had reframed the story of Henry Higgins, the phonetician who sculpts the bedraggled flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady; it became instead the story of Eliza Doolittle, a determined flower girl who, with the bully Henry Higgins as her chisel, sculpts herself.

It is still that story, in outline. But with four replacement principals now fully in place — Laura Benanti as Eliza; Danny Burstein as her father; Christian Dante White as her enthusiastic suitor; and Rosemary Harris as Higgins’s mother — the emphasis has changed in ways that are no less illuminating for being incremental.

 

Ms. Benanti, who says she has dreamed of playing Eliza since childhood, has used the years well to develop an interpretation that makes equal sense of the flower girl and the lady. In each case, she is self-possessed; it is merely the expression of that self-possession that changes. Outside Covent Garden, selling her violets, she is saucy and calculating: She catches Higgins in a lie and quietly memorizes his address. When he compares her voice to that of a bilious pigeon, she responds — not “quite overwhelmed,” as the script suggests — by expertly imitating the bird in question.

Imitation is key to how this Eliza learns; it is not through Higgins’s drumming vowels into her ear but through observation and mimicry of people who are kind to her. And you can see her working to maintain her hard-won knowledge; even while singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” she tries out her new vowels: “I’ll never knooooow what made it sooooo exciting,” she rhapsodizes, exaggerating her embouchure.

I mean no disrespect to Lauren Ambrose, who originated the role in this revival, to say that Ms. Benanti is a more effortless vocalist; she dispatches her very difficult and wide-ranging songs with glee, whereas in Ms. Ambrose’s performance, getting through them sometimes seemed like a metaphor for the character’s struggle.

Both ideas make for vivid theater, though the focus changes. Ms. Ambrose emphasized the way society limits a poor woman’s development and opportunity; Ms. Benanti emphasizes the way a gift, and the means to exploit it, can lead to liberation.

The show is lighter as a result, which is not to say it’s less compelling. Ms. Benanti’s scenes with Harry Hadden-Paton, remaining from the original cast as Higgins, are very finely observed, filled with the kind of new detail an extended run encourages.

That’s even more evident with the other principal holdover, Allan Corduner, as Higgins’s pal Pickering. Together the two men have developed a delightful meta-narrative from glances and gestures that connect the dots of an underwritten relationship.

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If the newcomers, other than Eliza, do not have as much opportunity to deliver distinctively original impressions, they make pointed adjustments along the margins. Mr. Burstein, following Norbert Leo Butz as the dustman with the soul of a philosopher, drives home the character’s rhetorical intelligence; I heard, perhaps for the first time, the speech rhythms (“I put it to you, and I leave it to you”) that so impress Higgins.

And as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Mr. White brings a full-throated tenor (his “On the Street Where You Live” is terrific) that complements a giddy, almost unbridled enthusiasm. This makes for less of a comment on effete society, as Jordan Donica’s hilariously twitty take on the character suggested, than a satire on the deracination of love.

But it is the recasting of the smallest principal role that makes the most touching difference, and like ev

erything connected to Ms. Harris’s stage presence, her success as Mrs. Higgins cannot be pinned down. Of course, one is so delighted to see her, at 91, some 67 years after her Broadway debut, carrying on with such aplomb. But it’s more than that. Ms. Harris has found a way into a role that has resisted most previous exploration, and then carried it off with exquisite taste. With little fuss and fewer words, she sketches a woman whose independence and complacency help explain her son’s more toxic versions of each.

When Higgins, distraught over Eliza’s departure, cries, “What am I to do?” she answers sweetly but without undue sympathy, “Do without, I suppose.” She’s not about to waste her time trying to change someone who does not want to be changed.

Wanted and unwanted change are exactly what “My Fair Lady,” like “Pygmalion” before it, is about. I mean change in individuals, of course, but also, as this blooming revival and its success make clear, in society. As such, its portrait of bullies and resistance may never wear thin. At least not this year.

[edjames]

Broadway’s My Fair Lady Announces Closing Date

 

The Lincoln Center Theater revival will play its final performance in the summer; a West End bow is expected to follow.

 

Lincoln Center Theater’s current revival of My Fair Lady will close at the Vivian Beaumont Theater July 7.

 

Directed by Bartlett Sher, the show stars Laura Benanti as Eliza Doolittle and Harry Hadden-Paton as Professor Henry Higgins. The show had previously announced that Benanti would play the role through July 7 and Hadden-Paton through July 6.

 

The production, which won the 2018 Drama Desk, Outer Critics and Drama League Awards for Best Musical Revival, will have played a total of 548 performances (39 previews and 509 performances).

 

The production will launch a national tour December 19 at the Opera House at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and has plans for an engagement in London's West End production (exact dates and casting to be announced).

The current cast also includes Alexander Gemignani as Alfred P. Doolittle, Rosemary Harris as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering, Christian Dante White as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Linda Mugleston as Mrs. Pearce, and Clarke Thorell as Professor Zoltan Karpathy.

[handiacefailure]

I saw it last weekend when I was in the BIg Apple and we got really good seats for $100 at TKTS. Was nice seeing a show at Lincoln Center. I love Laura and have seen her in a few shows.