'My Fair Lady' is loverly

It is the sign of a truly great production when the performances, design and direction come together to succinctly communicate a story to the audience. "My Fair Lady," the senior thesis of actress Laura Hankin '10 and the fall show of the Program in Theater, does just that.

The performances of the actors - from principals to supporting cast members - stand in the realm of Broadway quality, with careful attention to both dramatic tension and comedic relief. Hankin presents an adorably compelling Eliza Doolittle, with the voice and versatility to evolve from the feisty Cockney Eliza to the upright Ms. Doolittle. Her accent work - in both speech and song - is an expert accomplishment and vital to telling the story.

Competing with her for the audience's affection is the self-absorbed Henry Higgins, played by Shawn Fennell '10. No stranger to the Princeton stage, Fennell debuts his singing voice in a powerful and layered performance. His smooth transitions from speaking to singing lessen the potential abruptness of bursting into song that is often a hallmark of musical theater, and his tenderness by the play's end is both unexpected and welcome.

Andy Linz '11 brings a heightened playfulness to the character of Colonel Pickering, delivering scripted jokes with expert timing and embodying a funny physicality that brings the caricatured man to life. In the world of the musical, the over-the-top trumps the subtle, and Linz' comedic timing and expert delivery inject the show with an energy that is never lost.

The cast is rounded out with the strong tenor of head-over-heels Freddy (Dan Corica '12) and the grungy, self-absorbed father Alfred Doolittle (Gabriel Crouse '12). Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay '10's impeccable performance as the hilariously dry Mrs. Higgins leaves the audience in stitches as our chauvinist Henry Higgins is reduced to a child yelling for his mommy.

That egotistical sexism is the play's main source of humor and plot. We laugh at just how closed-minded Higgins can be when he asks, "Why can't a woman be more like a man? Can't a woman learn to use her head?" But is laughter our best response to such deep-seated sexism? We treat Eliza's mistreatment as funny, rather than speak out on her behalf. As spectators, it is only after the curtain falls that we can discuss the issues raised by the performance; but musical theater, and especially shows like "My Fair Lady," are more likely to send spectators out singing memorable tunes than debating gender politics. How should we react when the deepest sexisms of our past are preserved through catchy song and dance?

Interestingly, during Higgins' most blatantly sexist songs, my eyes wandered to the sides of the stage, where two students play Frederick Loewe's score on grand pianos. Both pianists are female. Whether intentional or not, two women are put in ultimate control of Higgins' voice; they provide the music he needs to sing his lyrical rant. In fact, from the director to the musical director to the stage manager, the production is filled with women who have devoted their time to tell this story. It is through this involvement of women in the production that Higgins' sexism is combated.

Of the three musicals this past weekend, the ensemble in "My Fair Lady" is by far the strongest. Occasionally, though, the performance reveals a directorial distrust of the script's humor. When the servants sing their chorus, "Poor Professor Higgins," one becomes overly hysterical, fainting offstage, and at the horse races during "Ascot Gavotte," an old, hunchbacked man bumps into a pole and has a heart attack. These forced attempts at humor deny the comedy already in the script: The servants' chorus is meant simply to transition between the humorous vignettes of Doolittle, Higgins and Pickering, and the comedy at Ascot should come from the aristocracy's enjoyment of a boring horse race. Instead, Eliza's failure to blend into this upper-class culture is upstaged by the director's decision to randomly knock out members of the chorus.

The most original part of the production is the set, which visually situates the piece in an unfinished, flat storybook world. The two-dimensional nature of the set situates the relationship of Higgins and Doolittle not in a realistic realm, but in a cartooned, fantastical one. The backdrops that create Higgins' study and the exterior of his home are left intentionally unfinished; pencil-drawn outlines of books, windows and chandeliers seem to wait for the audience to paint them in with their imaginations. This unfinished quality, along with the musical's ending, suggests that the story itself isn't finished and that the audience will somehow play a role in coloring in the blank canvas.

The American musical theater canon is finally being considered by the Program in Theater as worthy of academic inquiry, as evidenced by the recent arrival of musical theater scholars in the Lewis Center. The most often articulated bias against musicals is that they are primarily vehicles for entertainment and profit, but their very success demands that we take them seriously: Commercial artwork deserves, and perhaps even demands, criticism. What's most shocking is that "My Fair Lady" marks the first time in the Program in Theater's history that its fall show is a musical. Given the performances on stage and the full audiences in the house, we can only hope it won't be the last.

5 PAWS

Pros: Beautiful voices, beautiful sets, classic story.