New ‘My Fair Lady’ gears up for North American tour

NEW YORK – On a quiet Labor Day weekend in a sunlit, fourth-floor rehearsal studio just off of Times Square, the “Ascot Gavotte” is about to begin.\n“As we rehearsed it, ladies and gentlemen,” says associate director Shaun Kerrison. A casually clad group of performers, many wearing blue jeans and sneakers, strike the formal, upper-crust poses of proper Edwardian society as rehearsal pianist Laura Bergquist plunks out a familiar melody.\nNow more than a half-century old, “My Fair Lady,” one of the most beloved celebrations of musical theater, is getting ready to go out on the road again. The Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical, starring Christopher Cazenove as Henry Higgins and Lisa O’Hare as Eliza Doolittle, will be one of the major touring shows of the 2007-2008 theater season, running into next June.\nThe production, directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Matthew Bourne, is under the auspices of, among others, producer Cameron Mackintosh, a man who has had a long love affair with the musical.\n“I was lucky enough to be taken by my aunt to see Rex (Harrison) and Julie (Andrews),” says Mackintosh, recalling when the show’s original Broadway stars opened “My Fair Lady” in London. “I saw it three times during its long London run.”\nHe even wrangled an invite to the show’s closing-night party.\n“I had the most wonderful time on that last night. I was a very precocious 16-year-old at the time and I remember thinking, ‘This is the most wonderful musical, but this (replacement) cast isn’t really as good as when I saw it on previous occasions.”\nAs the producer of such marathon musicals as “Cats,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” Mackintosh knows a little something about long runs.\nThe man meticulously casts and watches over his shows. He first produced “My Fair Lady” in the late 1970s, with a British touring company that eventually came to London. It ran for more than two years. \nAnd Mackintosh says that care went into his latest version, which is based on the 2001 National Theatre production, starring Jonathan Pryce and Martine McCutcheon, that he later moved to the West End’s Drury Lane Theatre.\nThe producer had seen Cazenove play Capt. Von Trapp in a production of “The Sound of Music.” and thought he was “very, very good. The man is a terrific actor. And Eliza is the perfect part to discover somebody. It’s the perfect `Pygmalion’ story,” Mackintosh says, referring to the George Bernard Shaw play on which “My Fair Lady” is based – the tale of a professor who transforms a Cockney flower girl into a lady.\nO’Hare was in the original London cast of “Mary Poppins,” later graduating to the title role. When Cazenove took “My Fair Lady” on a successful tour of Great Britain, O’Hare was cast as the alternate Eliza.\n“Lisa was absolutely fantastic,” Mackintosh says. “She was born to play this part.”\nSally Ann Howes enthusiastically agrees. “When audiences discover Lisa, they are going to go absolutely mad for her,” she says.\nAnd Howes knows about Eliza. She was Julie Andrews’ first Broadway replacement. Now she is coming back to the show. For the first leg of the current tour, she will play Mrs. Higgins, the professor’s disapproving mother.\nWhen Howes leaves the company in January, the actress will be replaced by Marni Nixon, another performer with a strong “Fair Lady” connection. Nixon was the singing voice of Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza in the 1964 film version and has played the role in stock productions around the country.\n“I have just done the part (of Mrs. Higgins) in a concert version with the New York Philharmonic,” Nixon says. “And this gives me a chance to be part of the whole show again.”\nAsked about the differences between productions then and now, Howes expands on the contributions of Bourne, the choreographer who also gave London and New York his own, critically acclaimed take on “Swan Lake.”\nIn this “My Fair Lady,” according to Howes, Bourne underscores the differences of class, the dichotomy between the Cockney world of Eliza and her fun-loving father, Alfred P. Doolittle, and the high-tone world of Freddy Eynsford-Hill and the Ascot swells.\n“Matthew has gotten the low Cockney in all the gestures,” Howes says. “There is nothing Broadway about it. It’s very theatrical but it’s all Cockney. Then when you go to the upper classes, it’s all correct. The styles are so different. I don’t remember it being so different in the original.”