Review: My Fair Lady (Curve Leicester)

Review by Raphael Kohn

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Curve in Leicester has quite a knack for producing some rather interesting stuff every winter. Somewhat stereotypically, it’s often been well-known musicals, performed on skeletal sets, with vigour and passion. But this one’s a departure from that as this winter a visually sumptuous, no-minimalism-at-all production of the Lerner and Lowe classic musical My Fair Lady takes to their stage.

There’s a lot to love. If you love classic musicals with stunning costumes, detailed sets, and great vocals, you’re in luck. There’s nothing changed here (okay, a little bit, but I’ll come to that later) – flower seller Eliza Dolittle is found by phonetics professor Henry Higgins in Covent Garden. Motivated by a bet, he attempts to teach her ‘proper’ diction to present her as an upper-class lady at social events. As he says, she’s a ‘girl’ of the ‘gutter’, who he can change to ascend her class status. Not exactly politically correct, perhaps, but that’s to be expected.

What follows is two and a half hours of some actually fairly serious stuff, Higgins berating and bullying Dolittle, played for laughs. Higgins can be perceived as an absolutely atrocious person, reveling in his classist attitudes and enjoying his mistreatment of Dolittle. David Seadon-Young may be a younger actor than most to play Higgins, but with that comes an element of petulant childishness towards Dolittle that works brilliantly, his entitlement bursting out of him in droves. He’s utterly believable as an entitled upper-class snob, so convinced that he’s the only one who’s right in the world that he’s completely blinkered to his own nastiness.

Molly Lynch’s Dolittle, on the other hand, starts off strong, her empowered confidence bolstering her against his aggression from the very beginning. Occasionally a bit too over-the-top at the beginning, risking falling towards pantomime acting, she quickly picks it up throughout the show into a star performance. No star performance is complete without tremendous vocals, and luckily Lynch’s versatile voice manages to balance the light with the dark on a knife edge, soaring and floating through ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ while getting gritty in ‘Just You Wait’.

Unfortunately, this can only take My Fair Lady so far. In 2024, this piece cannot just be taken as light entertainment and only light entertainment – there are real themes of classism and abuse embedded and intrinsically written into the very fabric of the show. There have been numerous ways to go about exploring this in the post-#MeToo era, and while it’s not my place to say how any director should do this for their production, there’s a responsibility to each director in this day and age to find some way to avoid the trap of making this a romantic story between an abuser and his victim.

Director Nikolai Foster, however, falls straight into this trap. Higgins’ berating and misogynistic sneering is enough to curl the toes of even the most conservative viewer of the show, yet every moment of abuse is played for laughs, never able to take it seriously enough for a moment. It’s as if the production sides more with misogynists than with feminists, making Eliza the butt of the joke, not an empowered hero. And I apologise for spoiling the ending here, but despite everything that Higgins puts Dolittle through, and despite the strength that Lynch’s Dolittle displays in her character growth throughout the show, Foster ends the show by bringing them back together and pretty unambiguously ends with them falling in love, kissing happily.

If that were a ‘standard’ ending for the show in this day and age, I wouldn’t be as disappointed as I am. And it’s not just that a 2018 revival of the show made some waves with the radical (at the time) way Dolittle walks off autonomously from Higgins, there are many ways a production can interpret the ending to either cast some doubt about their future together or give Dolittle any agency in her own story without just replicating a famous revival. Nikolai Foster is a creative and intelligent director as we’ve seen from his previous work, so it simply feels confusing and unsatisfying to end in this way when we know he can be more insightful than this.

Funnily enough though, Foster does add his own twist in a surprising homoerotic undertone to Higgins and Colonel Pickering (an interesting but underused Minal Patel)’s interactions. It’s truly hilarious and unexpected, and creates a great deal of potential for this theme to be explored further. Indeed, during Higgins’ song ‘A Hymn To Him’, the line ‘why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ sung to Pickering finds new meaning, as if there’s more under the surface of Higgins’ misogyny that meets the eye, perhaps suggesting there’s something he’s hiding. But unfortunately, this never quite reaches fruition, and never quite gets the development it needs.

However, at the end of the day, this is a ‘traditional’ (apart from the homoeroticism) production of the show. And so, we get some truly wonderful costuming coming to life on stage, with some tremendous gowns and suits being worn. Costume designer Michael Taylor assembles some incredible looks, giving Dolittle a sparkling, pearlescent gown to wear to the Embassy ball which is so utterly magnificent it’s hard to look anywhere else.

Taylor also designs the sets of the show, primarily made of an empty space to create the street scenes in Covent Garden or at the Ascot Racecourse, with rotating blocks to create a detailed set for Higgins’ messy study. It all extends out into the auditorium, with doors at the sides for actors to enter into Higgins’ house or the local pub, fairy lights surrounding the circle, completed by Foster’s frequent use of the aisles (those who book aisle seats, make sure to keep your bags under your seats!).

The aesthetic trump card comes during Lynch’s performance of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, staged rather like an MGM film musical. The set parts to reveal a huge moon, a star-speckled backdrop, and a floor coated in a thick layer of fog as Lynch joyfully dances in the space. It’s practically worth the ticket price just for this song, which is borderline jaw-droppingly staged.

There’s joy too in Djavan van de Fliert’s portrayal of Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a true Musical Theatre star tenor with a tremendous voice and a delightful stage presence. It’s a shame that the text gives his part less to do (though as this is a 2024 revival of a 1956 musical, I can’t really criticise the text’s shortcomings here), because every moment he spends on stage is a revelation. He is a performer who exudes pure joy, especially in his almost showstopping rendition of ‘On The Street Where You Live’. It’s almost heartbreaking that his character arc ends without resolution – such is the quality of his performance that you can’t help but root for Freddy.

In fact, it’s all pretty excellently sung, leaning more into the musical theatre than operetta vibes of the piece. To that end, the score is condensed down by musical director George Dyer from the luscious original orchestration down to a nine-piece band. Hidden somewhere offstage (apart from the glorious Embassy Ball at the beginning of act two), they unfortunately sound a little bit tinny and thin, as if struggling to reach the full potential of this legendary score.

This is an evening of excellent vocals, some stunning setpieces, and just the right light entertainment we can expect from My Fair Lady, truly demonstrating just how much talent this country has in its performers. For those who separate out the politics from the show and just enjoy it as light entertainment, you’ll be absolutely thrilled. But in 2024, I can’t help but feel it’s time to expect a bit more from a modern production of My Fair Lady – a story that has classism and abuse at its core. It’s supposed to be a comedic political satire that pulls punches along with its laughs. I just feel there’s a degree of social responsibility here for modern storytellers to not give misogynistic men a victory. Maybe it’s time for our titular Fair Lady to have the last laugh.

My Fair Lady plays at Curve Leicester until 4th January 2025. Tickets from https://www.curveonline.co.uk/whats-on/shows/my-fair-lady/

Photos by Marc Brenner