My Fair Lady review

“I’ll never know what made it so exciting.” So sings Eliza Doolittle in I Could Have Danced All Night, one of the spirited songs in Lerner and Loewe’s perfectly constructed masterpiece My Fair Lady. What makes Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center production exciting is clear: two lead performances. Almost everything else, unfortunately, is problematic.

Harry Hadden-Paton starred in the US incarnation and gives a winning performance. An interestingly young Higgins – the hectoring, self-absorbed professor who teaches Eliza – he is wonderfully easeful. Tall and lean, he uses comic physical skill to underline his light-touch verbal wit. His quicksilver timing of his character’s mood swings, from rage to exuberance, is exhilarating.

The musical’s biggest switch is Eliza’s from flower girl to lady, a transition made convincing by Amara Okereke with both her bright soprano and real warmth. Her finest moment – and of the whole production – is the show’s pivot in the masterly The Rain in Spain, in which Okereke beautifully shows Eliza’s extended understanding of how, in order to change how she speaks, she has to truly listen.

Elsewhere, she is pushed too hard by Sher’s direction that turns scenes into effortful display, so much so that the chemistry between her and Higgins is largely theoretical. Sher is so busy presenting his directorial case for everything that the actual writing – in both the scenes and songs – is, ironically, not allowed to speak.

That extends to the musical values. Conductor Gareth Valentine has a hugely luxurious 36-piece band and the shimmering original orchestrations, but the playing is badly muddied by the baffling decision to smother them with orchestral amplification. Together with a seriously heavy-handed sound design, Loewe’s exquisitely detailed music sounds generalised.

There is elegance in Michael Yeargan’s consciously old-fashioned, revolving interior sets, although many look marooned on the Coliseum stage, London’s widest, and, none is helped by the alternately flat and bizarrely oversaturated lighting. Catherine Zuber’s costumes are ideally extravagant, although why poor Vanessa Redgrave – whose performance feels like a state visit – is out-acted by the millinery covering her face downstage in the Ascot scene is a mystery.

Self-conscious decisions abound. Freddy’s character is turned into such a gauche dimwit that Eliza’s potential interest in him makes no sense and flattens his song. Likewise, adding cancan dancers, some in contemporary-looking drag, to the sole big dance number Get Me to the Church on Time is equally jarring and further deflects from the lost attempt to build a head of steam.

Weakest of all is the ending, which rewrites the script. In attempting to give Eliza agency, it actually makes her look cruel. And that goes against the piece’s entire spirit.