Review: Broadway in Austin’s My Fair Lady

The national touring company of My Fair Lady (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

It's always the way that, no matter how the rest of a show is, you're always left with the strongest memory of the final moment. Thus it unfortunately is with the Lincoln Center production of My Fair Lady, the touring version of which is currently performing at the Bass Concert Hall as part of the Broadway in Austin series.

Fortunately, that memory will eventually be swept away by rising recollections of the preceding three hours of this captivating, funny, touching and wry rom-com musical, crammed with instantly recognizable showtunes, much of it spent in the captivating company of Anette Barrios-Torres as rough-tongued Sarrrf Laahndan flower girl Eliza Doolittle and Jonathan Grunert as pompous phonetician Henry Higgins.

The 1956 musical, from the heart of the Broadway-defining run by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, jumps to 1912 England and tackles an inherent truth: How you sound defines who you are. Nowhere is as rife with accents as the British Isles, where a skilled ear can tell not which county but from which side of which town a speaker hails. Higgins accepts a wager with houseguest Colonel Pickering (John Adkison) that he can have the caterwauling Cockney Eliza comport herself as a lady to the manner born within six months.

And caterwaul Eliza does. Barrios-Torres almost impeccably threads the needle of her inevitable mishmash delivery, reducing parts of her initial speech to a feline wail before a heartfelt "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" – a tease for her enchanting vibrato for "I Could Have Danced All Night" and the fiery energy of "Show Me." (Truly, is any other musical as loaded with instantly recognizable tunes?) Equally, Grunert adds a brittle arrogance to Higgins that makes the bombastic "Why Can't the English" and "A Hymn to Him" even funnier.

But, alas, this production ends on a bum note in dischord with the spectacle before.

The underlying story has undergone constant transformation. The original myth of Pygmalion, the ivory statue who comes to life, is a crude metaphor for an unsullied woman. George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion was a commentary on how the English middle and upper classes see their "social inferiors" as less than fully human. But while director Bartlett Sher undoubtedly digs deeper into the ... shall we say, challenging gender politics of the Lerner and Loewe text throughout the performance, the Frankensteining of Shaw's downbeat ending onto the musical's giddy levity is like ashes in the mouth. There are ways for Higgins to get his comeuppance and for Eliza to get her well-deserved victory, but this, quite frankly, ain't it, and for a nearly three-hour musical to peter out in such a way is deeply anticlimactic. One at least has to admire Sher for sticking to his guns, as this final beat has been a point of deep controversy since the original 2018 staging, with even proponents of his thesis often disappointed by the awkward execution.

This could be why Sher's second act delivers a rousing good time with a gorgeous vaudeville interpretation of "Get Me to the Church on Time," with Michael Hegarty as a hilariously dissolute Alfred P. Doolittle on one last hedonistic cavort through London before his nuptials. It's one of many showcases for the choreography by Christopher Gatelli, meshing as perfectly here in its chaotic color splashes with Catherine Zuber's sumptuous costume designs as it does with in the purposefully stilted and stylishly drab ensemble delivery of "Ascott Gavotte," or the captivating swirl of "The Embassy Ball." Hopefully, those are the moments that will abide.