As noted in my last blog, I didn’t go to the show last night. But I changed my mind and went today. Sue me.
I’ve seen the movie so many times that it was very hard to disassociate the play from the film while at the theater. Nevertheless, as with the movie, I loved it, and there were some specifics worth mentioning.
First, the terrific voices. The entire cast was a listening pleasure, although I’ll admit that some of the lyrics early in the show were hard to understand due to the Cockney accents and I was thankful that I was already so familiar with them.
Second, the use of the sets, that is the way in which they were moved around and the actors moved in concert with them. For me, it was beautiful choreography.
The show, as in the movie, doesn’t have a lot of dancing, a waltz here, a gavotte there. Despite the fact that Eliza could have danced all night, she doesn’t. It isn’t like, for example, the current Broadway production of The Music Man, which has added tap dancing, because why wouldn’t you when you have Sutton Foster. The only noticeable addition to me was the drag line helping to send Alfred P. Doolittle off to get married in the morning. That was some party.
Everyone knows the music is great, so no point in lingering, other to say that, with all due respect to the great Cole Porter, my all time favorite rhyming lyric, which I sat in the audience anticipating, continues to be the pairing of Budapest and ruder pest in the song You Did It. Alan Jay Lerner really did it!