My Fair Lady. Book & Lyrics Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Lowe. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG46TY, until 17 January 2026, 4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
Photo Credit: Pamela Raith.
My Fair Lady. Book & Lyrics Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Lowe. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG46TY, until 17 January 2026,
4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
“Lerner and Lowe classic well performed and spectacularly staged.”
A splendid set, lovely costumes, a first-rate band and a magnificent ensemble playing a multitude of roles make this Christmas offering at the Mill at Sonning well worth seeing. It has to be said that the score remains a joy to listen to but the book, loosely based on Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, is beginning to get a little hard to take. Shaw did not write a play in which Eliza, the flower girl with an East End accent picked up by the bachelor phonetics expert Professor Higgins in Covent Garden, ends up marrying him. The film version softened the ending and Lerner has turned it into a romance in which Higgens get Eliza who, instead of becoming someone with a future in her own right now she speaks properly, becomes the little woman who brings him his slippers for ever after and puts up with his foibles, which is what audiences wanted in 1956 and want still. Director Joseph Fitcher has altered the opening slightly – mid stage is a gramophone from which come voices that have been deliberately “altered” to improve the speaker's skills, one of which belongs to Margaret Thatcher – a pointless and silly gimmick. But he gets decent if not memorable performances from his two leads and the various Cockneys created by the ensemble whoop it up with energy although Mark Moraghan as Doolittle is nastier than usual - a rogue with no charm which makes his rumbustious numbers, With a Little Bit of Luck and I'm Getting Married in the Morning not quite the songs Lerner and Lowe intended them to be. They should stop the show, but it lumbers on. Whether any of this matter is, of course, open to question. Directors do what directors do. The Ascot Gavotte may not pack the punch of the original staging - Eliza's famous expletive falls as flat as can be when she tells the horses what to do - but the ensemble does its best to create a crows and when it comes to ball when Eliza meets Higgins's foe Zoltan Karpathy designer Natalie Tichener has come up with a collection of all black costumes which are gorgeous even if Eliza gets far too many diamonds. Simbi Akande as Eliza and Nadim Naaman as Higgins are fine and Sophie-Louise Dann is splendid as Mrs Higgins. One mystery is why Alfie Blackwell as to sing On the Street Where You Live has been made to play him as a dithering idiot. As for the famous Why Can't a Woman be More Like A Man? song for Higgins it is shudder making to listen today, which it wasn't when the show was first staged, It seemed funny then as an example of stuffed shirt bachelor behaviour, and now is simply awful. But the show looks great, set designer Diego Pitarch has worked wonders with the limitations imposed by the Sonning stage, musical director Nick Tudor ensures the score gets its just deserts, the ensemble is magnificent, and the production as a whole is a perfectly decent addition to the list of Christmas musicals Sonning has staged over the years.
Cast
Zaynah Ahmed – Ensemble
Simbi Akande – Eliza Doolittle
Imogen Bailey – Ensemble
Alfie Blackwell – Freddy Eynesford-Hill
Sophie-Louise Dann – Mrs Higgins & Mrs Hopkins
Francesa Ellis – Mrs Pearce & Mrs Eynesford-Hill
Will Foggin – cover Freddy
Emma Fraser – Ensemble
Nadia Kramer – Ensemble
Conor McFarlane -Jamie
Mark Moraghan – Alfred Doolittle
Nadim Naaman – Henry Higgins
Christopher Parkinson – Zoltan Marpathy
Jo Servi – Colonel Pickering
James William Pattison – Harry
Creatives
Director – Joseph Pitcher
Orchestrations – Charlie Ingles
Set Designer – Diego Pitarch
Costume Designer – Natalie Titchener
Cochoreographer – Alex Christian
Musical Director – Nick Tudo
Lighting Designer -Jamie Platt
Sound Designer – Chris Whybrow
Dialect – Liz Flint
