Maverick Life

Why My Fair Lady, a 70-year-old American musical based on a century-old British play, matters

Brittany Smith as Eliza Doolittle and Craig Urbani as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (Photo Nardus Engelbrecht)

4 Feb 2025

Hubristic Henry Higgins, callow Eliza Doolittle, roles that have been performed thousands of times around the world. But in a slick, richly rendered new version of My Fair Lady, actors Craig Urbani and Leah Mari manage to shine new light on these beloved characters. In the process they help invigorate and elevate this South African production of an unrivalled classic from the pantheon of musical theatre.

Code-switching is the practice of altering one’s style of speech, mannerisms or appearance in order to better blend into a group or social clique that differs from one’s own. It can involve switching language, accent, dialect, attitude or clothing, often in order to make the people with whom you’re aiming to blend in feel more comfortable.

It’s something we take for granted in South Africa where indigenous language speakers especially seem to be expected to adapt their linguistic abilities in order to keep up.

But code-switching’s also the modern term for what the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle achieves with flying colours in My Fair Lady, a 70-year-old musical that’s endured with good reason since it first hit Broadway in 1956.

Eliza, among the most famous code-switchers ever created for the stage, is one of two central characters in the musical that’s currently playing with a South African cast at Montecasino.

If the Johannesburg season is anything like its earlier run in Cape Town, it must be playing to packed houses, each performance culminating with rousing standing ovations.

The showstopping Get Me to the Church on Time with Mark Richardson as Doolittle in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht)

Audiences are not clapping and losing their minds because of the code-switching, of course, but because of the scintillating entirety of the show.

This My Fair Lady is on every level such a grand and generous production: from the powerful performances by an absolutely sparkling cast, to the exacting details of the set, the orchestra creating lush music and the propulsive choreography by Duane Alexander whose kinetic dance sequences make you want to get up and join the cast.

Even its comically misogynistic lyrics are a hit. As is its other key character, misogynist-in-chief Henry Higgins. He wins the audience over despite his almost diabolical contempt of womanhood, verbalised in a slew of linguistically creative insults aimed at Eliza after he discovers her flogging flowers while murdering the English language with her rough dialect and disregard for the rules of speech.

What ensues is the tale of a woman who – thanks to Higgins’s heavy-handed training (which includes forcing Eliza to speak with a mouth full of marbles) – rises above her social station, to the point where she capably inserts herself among the privileged and well-to-do, and tricks them into believing she’s one of them.

This nobody-to-somebody storyline is a familiar trope. It’s become a kind of blueprint for countless romcoms, from Pretty Woman to the plot of just about every Hallmark Christmas movie, in which a man somehow rescues a woman from some sort of ruinously unhappy life.

Mark Richardson (in top hat and tails) as Doolittle performing the triumphant Get Me to the Church on Time in My Fair Lady (Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht)

Leah Mari as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Kim Stevens)

It’s a narrative arc that’s been criticised by feminists for decades because it pushes the idea that women need saving and that a man is perfect for the job.

It’s a criticism against My Fair Lady, too, one that stands or falls according to each particular production of the show. With sufficient nuance in the direction and performances, the musical can land very differently, its tone and impact coming off as sophisticated social satire rather than brazen misogyny.

Few realise that the stage musical, which spawned the 1964 film that swept the Oscars, is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion, which was in turn based on an ancient Greek mythological character.

Shaw, who abhorred British elitism and was a crusader for women’s rights, envisioned Eliza as a kind of Trojan horse in his literary crusade against class-based prejudice and sexism.

His play was meant to parody the pompousness of high society by creating a scenario in which a woman plucked from rough circumstances is able to infiltrate aristocratic circles merely by changing the way she speaks. Eliza was designed to make fun of the elite, never to actively crave their sense of entitlement.

Leah Mari as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Kim Stevens)

Leah Mari as Eliza Doolittle (seated left), switching accents and outfits to fit in with the toffs, in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht)

Graham Hopkins as Colonel Pickering, Leah Mari as Eliza Doolittle and Craig Urbani as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Kim Stevens)

Some of that political subterfuge got lost along the way, though, since Shaw struggled to prevent productions of Pygmalion from going off course by leaning too heavily into some sort of simmering romance between Higgins the linguist and Eliza the reformed flower seller. Romantic comedies with uplifting “happily-ever-after” endings are, after all, crowd pleasers, and actors performing the play wanted to please.

The question then is whether or not it’s possible in a feel-good musical to preserve the integrity of Shaw’s tale of female equality while still satisfying audiences who are presumably looking for something joyous and uplifting rather than being preached to about the need for social reform.

In this South African production, whether by design or by pure instinct, director Steven Stead has managed to get the balance right. All the weight of Shaw’s message is there, but the musical never deigns to bring us down or burden us with the heaviness of its politics.

It helps that Higgins is played by Craig Urbani, an actor whose integrity and humanity enable him to find something in the character that is quite transformative.

Urbani commands the stage, imbues Higgins with such brio and wit as he takes on the role of the intellectually superior and yet emotionally stunted speech expert. And he does so with such palpable relish. As Higgins, he is evidently having the time of his life, whether he is being as mean as he can be or softening to the fluctuations of his heart, or simply stirring trouble, there is always some edge, some deeper layer that makes his interpretation of the character vastly interesting.

As much as Higgins snubs, belittles and rebukes Eliza while perpetually singing his own praises, you can’t help but suspect that what he sees in her is not merely his star pupil, but someone who is his equal.

While Urbani makes Higgins almost comically villainous, there’s a distinct sense that he’s also secretly channelling Shaw’s disdain for the class system, subversively rooting for Eliza and hoping not only that she will help him win his wager, but that she will beat the establishment at its own game.

In the end, it’s her ferocious independence, her rejection of superficial middle-class morality, that he’s in awe of.

Brittany Smith as Eliza Doolittle and Craig Urbani as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. (Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht)

Leah Mari, who I saw in the role of Eliza (she alternates the part with Brittany Smith, a soprano with Cape Town Opera), is a great match for Urbani’s sturdy intelligence and layered emotions. It’s her voice that first draws you in, and then she holds you emotionally as she is transformed from a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” into a woman capable of saying “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” without flattening a single vowel. Pure singing voice aside, Mari’s Eliza is also funny, smart and gorgeously real. And she has tremendous heart.

One reason Higgins and Eliza are such enduring parts is that their complex chemistry is baked into the way Shaw wrote these characters: in this production, that chemistry comes alive.

What’s more, the archetypes represented by Higgins and Eliza give us hope, enable us to imagine a better world.

It is not simply the story of a humble flower seller improving her lot in life, but also the tale of an educated man being humbled by a member of the so-called “fairer sex”. It’s what enables us in the audience to believe that a chauvinist creep is in fact capable of evolving into someone better.

Ultimately, it’s Higgins who needs reforming, and it’s Eliza who helps him reform.

In the realm of cultural criticism, it’s perhaps true that we too often fetishise drama and tragedy, and musicals are consequently relegated to the somewhat malign category of light entertainment, often assumed to be “frothy”. Perhaps it’s because intellectuals think it’s cleverer to sneer at the world, hate on nostalgia and plug their ears at those songs considered hits, the ones that are ultimately ear worms, that audiences irresistibly find themselves humming the morning after.

But My Fair Lady isn’t frothy, it’s frank.

Despite the fact that audiences have an exhilarating time from start to finish, it is also a tale of female empowerment and about the rise of a social underdog: we witness Eliza claiming her place in the world, outgrowing the pejorative “do-little” implied by her family name.

It may be a crowd pleaser and a non-stop delight, but this My Fair Lady also hints at the possibility of a Shavian ideal: a world in which code-switching is obsolete and women no longer have to work so much harder to be accepted as equals. DM

My Fair Lady is playing at Teatro Montecasino until 2 March.

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