Luis Escobar Reflections Photography Studio
My Fair Lady,” the classic Lerner and Loewe musical that opens for a two-and-a-half-week run this coming Thursday at the Marian Theatre, is balanced on both sides by history. On one side, any production has to escape from the clutches of the past: based on a Greek myth, turned into a George Bernard Shaw play, and then into a musical in 1956 and then the film in 1964. That’s a lot of learned culture and imagery. On the other side, there’s the politics of the musical that butts up against our cultural mores. In modern parlance, there’s a lot of “mansplaining” in this story of the upper-class phoneticist Henry Higgins, who teaches the lower-class Eliza Doolittle to erase her awful Cockney speech and ascend to high society.
“The parts that are giving us the hardest time is the relationship between Higgins and Doolittle,” says Andrew Philpot, who plays Higgins. “They have this teacher-student relationship, but at some point they are falling in love. But Higgins is so emotionally blocked and so not a ‘people person’ that it’s hard to find those moments where there is that connection. Because I spend so much of my time berating her and making fun of her!… I would hope the audience will be laughing at me (as Higgins) and not nodding their heads in agreement. He is a lost soul. Somewhere in his history, he was done wrong.”