TT: The two faces of Henry Higgins

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. A week after I wrapped up my furious circuit of New England summer theater festivals, today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the last of my reports on the shows I saw, the Ogunquit Playhouse’s My Fair Lady in Maine and Goodspeed Musicals’ Half a Sixpence, both of which delighted me. Here’s an excerpt.
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Could it be that “My Fair Lady” is a better work of art than “Pygmalion”? Heresy! Heresy! Yet such things, after all, do happen. Many theatergoers, myself among them, believe that “Falstaff,” Verdi’s last opera, is a distinct improvement on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and the musical that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapted in 1956 from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play is at the very least better loved than its source, containing as it does such gilt-edged standards as “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” “On the Street Where You Live,” “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” You can’t go wrong with a score that good, and while “Pygmalion” has a satirical edge that is dulled in “My Fair Lady,” Lerner’s book was faithful for the most part to both the spirit and the letter of Shaw’s great play.
Comparisons between the two shows were inevitably encouraged by the Roundabout Theatre Company’s lively 2007 revival of “Pygmalion,” but it’s been a decade and a half since “My Fair Lady” was last seen on Broadway. So when the Ogunquit Playhouse announced that Jefferson Mays, the Henry Higgins of the Roundabout’s “Pygmalion,” would be playing the same role in its revival of “My Fair Lady,” I decided at once to head north to Maine and check out his performance. It turned out to be exceptional, as did the rest of the production. Strongly cast and sharply directed by Shaun Kerrison, who also restaged the road-show version of Trevor Nunn’s West End “My Fair Lady” revival that recently ended a 24-city U.S. tour, this modestly scaled staging is an immensely appealing piece of work that pleased me no end….
Pop quiz: What other musical about class warfare is based on a celebrated piece of Edwardian literature? Answer: “Half a Sixpence,” now being performed to exhilarating effect by Goodspeed Musicals, was adapted by David Heneker and Beverley Cross from “Kipps,” H.G. Wells’ once-popular 1905 novel about a working-class draper’s apprentice who inherits a fortune and is catapulted into the ranks of medium-high society. Needless to say, Cross’ book retains little more than the bare outline of “Kipps,” a 500-page socialist tract disguised as a Dickensian romance in which the author of “The War of the Worlds” railed against “the great stupid machine of retail trade,” but the musical still manages to hint at Wells’ righteous anger, albeit in much-blunted form….
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Read the whole thing here.