Once upon a time, “My Fair Lady” got a fresh feminist revival and the results were utterly loverly.
The ever thoughtful director Bartlett Sher strips away the fairytale veneer from the classic Lerner and Loewe musical to expose its piercing themes. The Tony-winning Sher (“South Pacific,” “The Light in the Piazza”) leans into the gender and class tropes that George Bernard Shaw sharply upended in “Pygmalion,” the 1913 comedy upon which the musical is based.
In this glittering gem of a revival, the echoes of the Victorian era can be clearly heard in the age of Me Too. Meet an Eliza Doolittle (a formidable Shereen Ahmed) who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, no matter how rich and powerful they are.
The Covent Garden flower girl may be filthy, starving and desperate but she can still speak truth to power. Ahmed’s Cockney accent turns vowels into a feral symphony of purrs, shrieks and yowls. The actress delivers a wistful “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and she turns “Without You” into a rousing call to arms.
It’s transformative to the piece that the battle of wills between Professor Henry Higgins (a wonderfully infantile Laird Mackintosh) and Doolittle seems evenly matched here.
There are still cringe-worthy moments, such as when Higgins calls her “deliciously low” and a “presumptuous insect,” but the insults sting less because this Higgins often seems more like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum than an imperious professor.
He underestimates Eliza because he has no idea how strong she has had to be to survive on the streets. He is so rich he never really had to grow up.
Higgins and his old-money chum Colonel Pickering (a wry Kevin Pariseau) decide to give Eliza an upper crust makeover because they don’t realize that she is a human being and not a pet to be tamed.
And yet the genius of Sher’s revival is the authenticity of the emotional interludes. You can feel the attraction building between Higgins and Eliza just as you believe her heartbreak when she realizes she can never again feel at home with the hoi polloi. Even the most caricatured moments here feel real.
Arthur Doolittle (an hysterically funny Adam Grupper) sparks so much winking camaraderie with the audience that the crowd howled at his every denunciation of middle class morality.
The perfectly choreographed high society tableaux in the “Ascot Gavotte” number is worth the price of admission. And the ending, which beautifully blends ambiguity and regret as Higgins tries to put Eliza in her place once more, feels both earned and satisfying.
From start to finish, this exquisite revival is filled with so much exuberant nuance that you, like Eliza, may feel like you could dance all night.
Contact Karen D’Souza at karenpdsouza@yahoo.com.
‘MY FAIR LADY’
Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, based on “Pygmalion,” by George Bernard Shaw
Through: Nov. 28
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco
Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $56-$256 (subject to change); 888-746-1799, www.broadwaysf.com
