My Fair Lady review – comedy and chemistry light up Opera North’s musical-theatre triumph | Musicals

Tthe Lord above gave man an iron hand: so says Alfred Doolittle, England’s most original moralist. By design rather than luck, James Brining’s new My Fair Lady (a co-production of Opera North and Leeds Playhouse) gives Prof Higgins just the opposite. Loose-limbed, soft-edged and chaotic, his vulnerable model of masculinity – juxtaposed against Eliza with unflinching wit and poise – offsets the book’s casual misogyny in a production that takes the issue of social mobility seriously but still manages plenty of comedy and chemistry on the road.

The casting of opera singers in musical theater can go very well or very badly; in the case of soprano Katie Bird – like much of the cast, a member of the Opera North chorus – it’s pure inspiration. From her first “mistress,” she’s an irresistible Eliza: radiantly sung, innately funny, and utterly believable in a characterization that avoids the clichés on either side of her “rain in Spain” transformation. John Hopkins’ Higgins takes a little longer to hit his stride, but I’m an Ordinary Man finds him visibly, if not always clearly, in his element and the fragile, laugh-or-cry energy he brings to the – her late scenes with (and without) Eliza are convincing.

More conventional, but no less appealing, Richard Moseley-Evans is a brilliant, Falstaffian Alfred Doolittle – he and his fellow chorus members make the opera cheerful with I’m Getting Married in the Morning in particular – while Ahmed Hamad is a fresh voice , star – Freddy and Dean Robinson looked at a devilish Colonel Pickering. In a world of narcissistic men, Brining carefully emphasizes Eliza’s female allies: Helen Evora’s quietly compassionate Mrs. Pierce and Miranda Bevin’s indomitable Mrs. Higgins. Opera North’s orchestra turns its hand to musical theater as deftly as its singers, playing with sparkling lightness of touch under conductor Oliver Rundell.

Madeline Boyd’s singular, hybrid set, with Higgins’ filing cabinets stacked atop Doolittle’s glazed brick pub, and gramophones and flower carts brought in as needed, is emotionally Edwardian, as are her costumes—precious tones for Eliza, muted grays for high society – and Guy Hoare’s design for gas lamp lighting. Boyd and Brining’s hilarious take on the infamous Ascot scene, necessarily staged here with neither Cecil Beaton’s dresses nor his budget, is particularly inspired.

As tempting as it is to rank My Fair Lady as a Cinderella story, the truth is more muddled: Eliza learns long before Higgins that the outward markings of another social class will not automatically grant her all her privileges, and upward mobility alone cannot guarantee a happy ending. Bringing the pair together in the final moments of the show was always ambiguous. Here, poignantly, it is hinted that she may not have returned at all – or at least not yet.