by Kevin McLaughlin
Ohio Light Opera’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady seems tailor-made for the company’s knack for giving familiar repertory fresh legs.
Half Edwardian social experiment, half hit parade, Jacob Allen’s staging treats its manners and melodies as pleasures rather than relics, while keeping the show’s questions about social class, gender stereotypes, and women’s independence unresolved. The show runs in rep through August 2 at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. I saw the performance on June 17.
The plot, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, remains familiar. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins wagers with a colleague that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower seller whose accent he finds intolerable and whose intelligence he badly underestimates, and pass her off as a duchess. Through drills, bullying, coaxing, and one miraculous breakthrough involving ‘The Rain in Spain,’ he succeeds. The trouble is that Eliza turns out not to be clay in Higgins’s hands, but a person with an acute self-awareness.
