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 The timeless tale about the making of a lady, MY FAIR LADY has been described as the perfect musical. Leading lad MATTHEW ROBINSON tells SEANNA VAN HELTEN why.
My Fair Lady is a sharp musical comedy of manners, as famous for its sparring leads as its memorable elocution lessons (“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain…”). The original on-stage score was written for Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, and after a record-breaking run on Broadway it was adapted for film, starring the beautiful Audrey Hepburn (albeit with a singing double). Opera Australia and QPAC now present a limited season, featuring Australian stage greats Reg Livermore, Rhys McConnochie, and rising star, musical writer and performer Matthew Robinson.
The story begins with a bet: crotchety linguistics professor and self-described misogynist Henry Higgins (to be played by Reg Livermore) is challenged by his friend Colonel Pickering (Rhys McConnochie) to transform a Cockney fall girl, Eliza Doolittle (Taryn Fiebig) into a ‘lady’. But although she is common as muck, feisty Eliza is no fool; her elocution lessons with Henry Higgins soon descend into a sharp-witted comedy of manners.
That is, before they take a romantic turn. Here’s where Queensland-born musical performer Matthew Robinson enters. Robinson has performed in contemporary stage musicals such Mamma Mia! and, as a writer, is also the youngest recipient of Australia’s richest theatre-writing accolade, the Pratt Prize for Music Theatre, awarded for his musical, Metro Street (currently in development for its first full-scale Australian production). In My Fair Lady, Robinson plays young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who “provides a buffer between Higgins and Eliza.”
Says Robinson, “He falls for Eliza Doolittle at her first prim and proper outing as a lady at the Ascot Races.” Without wanting to give too much of the romantic denouement away, Robinson hints that Freddie is the foil to Higgins’ brutish extreme. “Henry Higgins is not the easiest of men to navigate, and he’s certainly not a romantic. What Freddy provides is the opposite end of the pendulum swing, showing Eliza just how doting men can be when they’re in love with her. And so he provides a catalyst for her journey in deciding what she wants from love.”
Eliza predates Julia Robert’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold in Pretty Woman, but the story is based originally on English satirist George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, the title of which pays homage to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with his own statue. With a plot of such fine literary pedigree, is this why My Fair Lady has been described as the perfect musical?
“I think because, first of all, the show, and the character of Henry Higgins, revolves around the concept of language,” Robinson answers. “Because musicals as of about Show Boat [1936] became much than just song and dance, that opened up the world, and Broadway in particular, to the idea that musicals could be primarily great stories, which are then moved forward by songs.” Replacing the music hall-style revues and light operettas of the previous century, Robinson explains, new musicals such as My Fair Lady relied on a strong sense of narrative. The performer also praises Shaw’s play as the show’s foundation: “Shaw’s play is so wonderfully structured … It sets up the musical, and the film, to be a well-structured piece.
“And really,” Robinson continues, “the beautiful, structured nature of the show is equally matched in this particular Opera Australia production by the ridiculously lavish structure of the way the show is presented … Even I watch from backstage and think, ‘This is beautiful.’ I haven’t seen something so classy and lavish!”
MY FAIR LADY plays for a limited season at the Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, from August 31 until September 27. Tickets are available from Qtix 136 246 or www.qtix.com.au
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