Theater Review: How to turn drama into a musical, and how not to

My Fair Lady

Music by Frederick Loewe

Words by Alan Jay Lerner

Directed by Bartlett Sher

Starring Laura Benanti, Harry Hadden-Paton, and Danny Burstein

Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan

January 9, 2019

Clueless, The Musical

Written by Amy Heckerling

Directed by Kristin Hanggi

Starring Dove Cameron

January 8, 2019

Not just every popular play, book, or movie can become a musical. Two recent examples of this were on full display in Manhattan. First for the good. The Bartlett Sher production of My Fair Lady was brilliant, exciting, and thought provoking, remarkable for an old chestnut from the 1950s. The story of how Henry Higgins turns Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady started with the Greek myth Pygmalion, where, the sculptor, dissatisfied with women, creates his own perfect sculpture of one, who then comes to life (courtesy of Athena) and becomes his wife. George Bernard Shaw later turned this into his play about class and women’s rights Pygmalion (1917), where the linguist Higgins takes on Eliza as an academic project, but fails to see how she grows into a real woman with her own opinions, and every bit his equal. She leaves him at the end of the play, disgusted by his inability to see her as a coequal partner, perhaps because of both her sex and her birth. Apparently from the start, Shaw felt pressure to create a more happy ending with the couple getting together, and by the time of the first film version of the play in 1938, that is exactly what happened (without Shaw’s approval). This happy-ending version eventually became My Fair Lady in 1956. The musical, perhaps one of the most perfect ever created, was largely faithful to the Shaw play in both its plot and dialogue. Ah, but the ending. Earlier in the play, Eliza, angered by Henry’s insensitivity, throws his slippers at him. In the musical this also happens, but at the play’s end, after it appeared that she would leave him, she comes back to his study. He’s listening to his recording of her as a street girl (does he really miss the old Eliza, below him in class?). His last line is “Where the devil are my slippersh?”. She looks poised to stay and provide them, although this is not explicit. See the movie version here to get a sense of this ambiguity. .

In doing this musical in 2019, the era of #MeToo, how do you play this out? Shaw saw Henry as a creep who failed to recognize his newly “created” woman as an equal, but this is decidedly toned down in the musical, since we need a happy ending. Bartlett Sher designed a masterful solution. Throughout, this become Eliza’s not Henry’s musical. She shows real grit, intelligence, and determination from minute one. After she succeeds in duping the aristocracy into thinking she is one of them, her “I Could have Danced All Night” becomes less about her romantically dancing with Henry, but about her success in remaking herself. She did not pout in the corner after Henry does his self-congratulatory “You did it” taking credit for the entire experiment, but instead rather angrily paced around. See the original more passive version from the movie here…watch Eliza, not Henry, and note that at one point she actually reaches down to get those infamous slippers for him. Actress Laura Benanti (Tony award for Gypsy) looked a bit like Hepburn, but with more edgy features and personality, and brought toughness to the role. 

All this as well as delivering the iconic songs like “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” with panache and beautiful technique. Equally good was the British actor Harry Hadden-Paton (Downton Abbey), who appeared about as young as Eliza (Shaw’s desire), getting away from the creepy older man-younger woman dynamic of Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn/Julie Andrews in the movie and Broadway show. Here he seems like an emotionally clueless young academic so caught up in his experiment that he forgets about feelings (Eliza’s and his own). I loved his ambiguity. “I’ve Grown Accustomed to her Face”, about the closest thing in the musical to a love song, actually lurches back and forth between Henry’s nascent attraction for Eliza and his general scorn for women, and Hadden-Paten played both halves of the song equally.  It was a very real, convincing portrayal. Bartlett Sher’s direction was fast moving and dynamic. The magnificent sets included a lush multi-level wood library/home which oozed Georgian elegance. 

But this often moved out of the way to reveal a dark, nearly blank stage for the working class scenes, emphasizing Shaw’s class division message. Sher even solved one of the musical’s few flaws, as its second half has much less music and becomes much more of Shaw’s play. Sher addressed this asymmetry by extending “Get me to the Church on Time” into a full blown (almost surreal) production number including male cancan dancers in drag, delivered with great Vaudeville style by Danny Burstein.

Now back to that ending. Sher intelligently just restored the Shaw original. As Eliza walks into the study and sees Henry reminiscing over her old recordings, she simply stares at him and walks out up the stairs into the audience, giving her a deserved boost into society after all her work and trauma. A perfect 2019 solution to a 1950s musical, yet true to the original intent. This was an outstanding revival of perhaps the best musical ever written.

On the other hand there was Clueless, the Musical. Amy Heckerling, who wrote and directed the iconic 1995 film (“As If!”), took 20+ years to remake it into a musical. Unfortunately, as I watched the performance it never became clear why this was needed. 

First, the movie while a nice stylish time capsule of 1990’s consumerism, wealth, and newfound class snobbery set in a Beverly Hills high school, was never much of a thoughtful film. We see the wealthy Cher (Alicia Silverstone) shop, help out ugly girls, test out her vocabulary, and finally find her own love (the young Paul Rudd in his breakout film role). What little dramatic interest there is comes from Silverstone’s charming ability to project intelligence and actual vulnerability through all the superficiality (this was the Valley Girl era). Re-viewing the film, I found its adoration of wealth really intolerable given our subsequent knowledge that the 1990s was just the start of decades of income inequality. In making the musical in 2018, I suppose if Ms. Heckerling had somehow redone the plot or characters to at least show some irony this might have worked, since the music, a mix of 90’s type pop numbers, well matched the style and tone of the movie. Thirty-somethings around me in the audience, perhaps reliving their teen years, were constantly chuckling at the numbers which doubtless were derived from some record by the Spice Girls or Madonna that was unfamiliar to me (I did recognize a “Super Freak” derivative). But Dove Cameron played Cher with more of a Disney “High School Musical” naïve perkiness than Silverstone did, and was too monochromatic. Most fatal, Ms. Heckerling felt the need to almost clone her movie (down to the haircuts, early laptops in multiple plastic colors, and plaid outfits), leaving out not a single scene, plus adding musical numbers. It’s one thing when you clone Pygmalion, another when you clone Clueless. This made for a 2 1/3 hour deep dive into our most superficial decade, and grew very tedious. The other problem with cloning something is that you can then not get the film’s original actors out of your head, and these stage actors mostly came up short in talent vs. their Hollywood progenitors. Except as an exercise in 90’s nostalgia and for a couple well staged dance numbers (opening and closing), Clueless the Musical was a pretty big waste of talent and time.