Fine, Familiar and Very Entertaining

Yes, this gal is almost 60 years old, but “My Fair Lady” at the Sharon Playhouse is wonderfully entertaining.

That’s because Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner preserved the bones and notions of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” a small play about caste and style and transformation in the waning days of Edwardian England. 

Also, the leads are terrific. Rufus Collins is a loose-limbed, wry, cold-blooded and beguiling Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who can tell the origins of a Londoner within a block or two by his speech. Higgins is in Covent Garden taking notes on the vowels of Cockney traders there when he becomes most particularly fascinated by the “depressing and disgusting noises” issuing from Eliza Doolittle, a flower vendor who, Henry figures, “has no right to live.”

Henry is a hard case. But Shaw as well as Lerner, who wrote the book for “My Fair Lady,” and Rex Harrison, who played the first Henry in 1956 (upon which most actors model their rendition, Collins being no exception) need plenty of room to make change in their characters. And though Higgins, a vain, oblivious mysogynist at the start, is hardly reformed by the end of Act II, he is altered at least by his experiment to make a lady of Eliza.

Lee Harrington’s Eliza does make horrible, howling, anguishing noises as Henry strives to refine her vowels. In time, of course, she is tremendously altered by Henry’s instruction, so much so that she loses her feeling of place. She does not belong in her old world any more, nor does she feel right in the new one.

Harrington’s voice is that kind of floating, inflected soprano that wrings hearts. She’s grand as Eliza.

Michael Douglass plays Colonel Pickering, Henry’s fellow adventurer in this effort to transform Eliza, and though burdened by some of the absurdities of his tribe, he has a kinder heart than many of its members.

Among the smaller roles, Ginny Rickard is a knowing and expressive Mrs. Pearce, Henry’s housekeeper; and Emily Soell as Henry’s mother is fine as the woman altered and made more human by Eliza.

All the big moments  work in this production: Eliza’s triumph as she catches on to Henry’s instruction, the beautiful scene at Ascot in which Eliza enchants Freddy Eynesford-Hill (Matt Schmiedel) with her peculiar and inappropriate small talk, the ball at which another speech specialist,  Zoltan Karpathy (David Fanning), nails Eliza as a fake because her English is so good. She must be a Hungarian aristocrat, he says. 

Then there is Henry’s outrage at Eliza’s hurt when he ignores her accomplishments and revels in his own. It’s all there: the big moments, the costume finery, Loewe’s lovely music, the outrages and the pain, the illusion of grandeur accomplished by lights and arches, some nifty theatrical maneuvering and, just incidentally, the very snappy scene changes.

If the dancing in the opening scene in Covent Garden seems hectic and wrongheaded and out of some other musical, the entire production settles in soon enough with grace and certainty and ends with a very clear idea of Henry and Eliza’s future.  

“My Fair Lady,” directed and choreographed by Richard Stafford, runs at the Sharon Playhouse through July 5. 

For tickets and information, call 860-364-7469, or go to www.sharonplayhouse.org.