David Sutton In “My Fair Lady” At Capital Repertory Theatre

a review by Alex Brooks
The Capital Repertory Theatre has opened its holiday production of My Fair Lady, the story of Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl taken on as a project by a cranky and somewhat misogynistic aristocrat with an interest in phonetics, who makes a bet that he can teach her to speak upper-crust English well enough to fool the lords and ladies of high society.
The play is a musical adaptation of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play,  by the famous team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The original 1956 Broadway show starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews ran for over six years and won nine Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical. The score contains such Broadway classics as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “On the Street Where You Live,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
The play is normally done with a big cast and a big orchestra, but this production involves a total of 15 actors and two pianos, which allows it to fit in the intimate space of the Capital Rep. Remarkably, these two pianos are played, with great skill and elan, by the actors who are not on stage at the moment, so keyboard duties rotate from one actor to another, sometimes in mid-scene. The settings are simple, elegantly solving the notoriously difficult set design problems of this play, such as the frequent changes from inside to out, by such devices as lowering indoor lighting fixtures for indoor scenes, and street lights for outdoor scenes.
As performed by this remarkable assemblage of talent, in an intimate space, we have no trouble seeing why this has become one of the most popular musicals of all time. The music is simple, wonderful and high spirited, and the culture clash of the opera-going Henry Higgins’ set with Eliza’s cockney crowd is endlessly amusing. Allison Spratt is radiant as her Eliza emerges from the straitened world of her youth into the endless possibilities of Higgins’ world. But when she and Henry start to fall for each other, the tension between Shaw’s 1913 British sensibility, that of the original play, and Lerner and Loewe’s 1950s American sensibility, becomes evident. Shaw had argued that the two could not possibly be happy together and so saw their attraction as a doomed romance, while Lerner and Loewe, with their American notions of social mobility and personal transformation, bring to it an optimistic, anything-is-possible attitude. This production definitely comes down on the Lerner & Loewe side of this divide, although one leaves the theatre wondering, if there is to be a marriage of these two, how it could possibly be a happy one. But, luckily, the part of the story we see is all about characters expanding their horizons, and everybody is having a lot of fun doing it, the audience most of all.
Speaking of fun, one ought to mention David Beditz, a regular at the MacHaydn Theatre in Chatham, who plays Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, and brings a Falstaffian gusto to the role which enlivens all of his scenes. Larry Daggett, a newcomer to the Capital Rep, makes a very amusing character of Colonel Pickering, a slightly silly but good-hearted aristocrat who models all that is endearing about the British upper class.
Hoosick’s own David Sutton (yes, the School Board President) is a prominent member of the ensemble, alternating with great aplomb from playing an aristocratic grandee named Lord Boxington to playing a gin-soaked garbageman who pals around with Eliza’s father. He is a member of the Cockney Quartet, which is featured in many of the Covent Garden songs, sometimes in four-part harmony. Sutton’s considerable singing ability is much in evidence here.
If you want to catch a first rate production of a renowned musical, don’t miss this one. The show will be running through December 20. Tuesday-Thursday performances are at 7:30, Friday at 8, Saturday at 3 and 7:30 and Sunday at 2:30. Ticket prices range from $36 to $52. For more information, call the box office at 518-445-7469 or visit www.capitalrep.org.