Crummy Scenery Detracts From Talent In 'Fair Lady'

Crummy scenery detracts from talent in ‘Fair Lady’

By Norman Gibson

NEWS DRAMA REVIEWER

The Ann Arbor Civic Theater production of Lerner and Loewe’s musical “My Fair Lady” survives some pretty tacky scenery in the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater.

The only reason the scenery is important in the work, about a flower girl who would be dutchess against her will, is that a distinction is made in the script. It calls for a division between the English upper and lower classes, something like George Bernard Shaw did in his “Pygmalion,” the source of the Broadway musical.

But the scenery in the Civic Theater production does everything but fall down. It is so flimsy, so improperly braced, the walls flap whenever a door is closed. It is so agitated, it gets tangled in itself when flats are dropped from up above. It is so cumbersome, they have trouble pushing it offstage and out of the way at the end of scenes.

Curtains are employed so infrequently, the audience constantly is subjected to watching the pulling and tugging of stagehands as they try to make it interlock.J. Dillard Murrell wearily leads the orchestra through reprise after reprise of every tune in the production, trying ineffectually to ease some of the pain of the scene-changing ineptness on stage.

MOREOVER the scenery often so fills the stage, it is a wonder that Mike Gauvin’s dancers don’t collide with it more often. That the dancing often is upstaged by the overpowering and unartistic, mostly inappropriate set, is a shame because Gauvin has come up with wonderful concepts in at least two instances—the “Ascot Gavot” and “Embassy Waltz” numbers.

Although it is easiest to pretend that there is no scenery cluttering the scenes, the simple designs behind the race track and the embassy ball numbers are quite effective, maybe because they are a relief from all the other clutter.

The tawdry scenery, however-,doesn’t diminish the production completely. There is too much talent in the staging by director Terry Matthies to let languish the musical about high life and low life just out of England’s Victorian period.

Nancie E. Krug is very likable as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller who undergoes a metamorphosis at the hands of a snobbish English linguist who proceeds on a bet to improve the girl’s speech. Krug is entrancing as she verbally jousts with the professor in the gutter speech in Covent Garden and under great personal stress tries to learn acceptable upper class pronounciation at Prof. Higgins’s house. She reaches the high point when she suddenly captures all of Higgin’s teachings and exhalts about it in soaring song.

HOWEVER in the second act, which is almost all denouement, Eliza is all but ignored for a long time and it is good to have Krug

back for the poignant but stirring finale.

Mitchel Roberts McElyra is a peppery and loose-jointed Prof. Henry Higgins. He has a faint resemblence to Meredith Wilson and the one thing really noticeable about McElyra’s performance is that he can be heard clearly any place he happens to be on stage.

In a way, McElyra’s performance is towering but somehow James J. Piper seems always to be looming over him as Piper plays the stiff and nearly always formal Col. Hugh Pickering. It is anything but damaging to the production but the extremely flexible McElyra does not succeed in dominating the stage until the moment he is alone in the spotlight .to sing of Higgins singular triumph.

Charles Sutherland clearly turns out a superior performance as Alfred P. Doolittle, the scheming dust collector father who sells his daughter for five pounds and finally finds that a sudden and unexpected wealth gives him the one thing he never expected, respectability.

It’s a good cast all the down the ranks, from Alene R. Blomquist’s housekeeping Mrs. Pearce to David Keosaian’s Yugslovian count,

from Burnette Staebler’s Mrs. Higgins to John Butterfield’s Freddy Eynsford-Hill.