SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Nov. 9, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — Get ready for a loverly night at the theater as the national tour of the critically acclaimed Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” comes to Salt Lake City starting Sunday.
Director Bartlett Sher’s glowing production is “thrilling, glorious and better than it ever was” according to The New York Times. Entertainment Weekly called the revival “a sumptuous new production of the most perfect musical of all time.”
Boasting such classic songs as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “The Rain in Spain,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “On the Street Where You Live,” the show tells the story of Eliza Doolittle, a young Cockney flower seller, and Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor who is determined to transform her into his idea of a “proper lady.” But who is really being transformed?
The revival, which opened on Broadway in April 2018, is the winner of five Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, five Drama Desk Awards and three Drama League Awards.
Adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play and Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 motion picture “Pygmalion,” “My Fair Lady,” with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, premiered on Broadway in 1956. The legendary original production won six Tony Awards including Best Musical and ran for 2,717 performances making it, at the time, the longest-running musical in Broadway history.
This touring production welcomes Anette Barrios-Torres as Eliza Doolittle, and the returning cast includes Jonathan Grunert as Professor Henry Higgins, and Michael Hegarty as Alfred P. Doolittle.
Gephardt Daily spoke with Hegarty the day before this tour’s first performance in Boise, Idaho, on Wednesday. The show then comes to the Eccles Theater at 131 S. Main St., beginning Sunday, Nov. 12 and running until Sunday, Nov. 18. Tickets are available here.
As well as having played Doolittle for a year already, Hegarty has appeared in the national tour of Bartlett Sher’s “Fiddler on The Roof,” as well as regional productions of “The Producers,” “Les Misérables,” “Footloose,” “Kinky Boots,” “Damn Yankees,” and “Sweeney Todd.” He’s also been seen in the CBS TV show “Tommy” with Edie Falco, and the movie “Better Nate Than Ever.”
Hegarty described how this revival of the show opened on Broadway in 2018, then the first national tour began the year after. The show closed during the pandemic, for 18 months, then opened back up and the first tour continued. Then the second national tour opened in fall 2022, which was when Hegarty joined the cast.
He talked about his journey with the role of Alfred P. Doolittle, who is Eliza’s father.
“I saw the Broadway show, at the time I was touring with ‘Fiddler on the Roof, also directed by Bart [Sher],” Hegarty told us. “We were on hiatus for a month in July 2019. I got to see a friend of mine, Adam Grupper, that I met through… he was in the Broadway show of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and I played the same role on the first national tour. He was in the ensemble of ‘My Fair Lady,’ and he had put on social media, ‘if anyone’s interested, I’m going on as Doolittle on these dates.’ It was Alexander Gemignani, who was playing the role [of Alfred P. Doolittle] at the time. It would have been their third Doolittle on Broadway. Adam was taking some performances. So I said, I’m going to go on to TodayTix and get some tickets.
“So I go see the show and then he gave me a backstage pass. So I get to go backstage, say hi to them, and I saw Bart walk by, at one point. He and I knew each other through ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ So he kind of looked at me and it was just out of context, you know, and I had no idea at the time at that time, that three years from then I would be playing the part. It was just kind of one of those things. It’s always been one of those parts, ever since I saw the movie, the original movie, and I had done ‘My Fair Lady’ in college, done Henry Higgins in college, so that was originally the part in my head. But in Bart’s show, especially seeing Adam in that role, and knowing that I played Adam’s role, the rabbi, in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ kind of like I was looking at that and saying, is that where Bart would see me in that role? And then the first national started touring or rehearsing, I don’t know when they actually left, while I was doing ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ so I was not involved in it then. But when it came back around after the pandemic, they were looking for actors and then I submitted for it, got the audition, went into the city for the callback, saw Bart in the room and he remembered me from ‘Fiddler’ you know, all that stuff, and the rest is history.”
Hegarty also talked about what he loves about playing the character of Alfred P. Doolittle.
“This is a guy who has a very specific philosophy and to use Higgins’ words, it’s his code of morals, he calls him the most original moralist in England,” Hegarty said. “And he has this code that he lives by, and it’s his life, it’s his lifestyle, he is very true to who he is. This guy knows who he is, even when the circumstances change for him, later in the show, he’s still who he is. Maybe the joke is that a little bit of his hypocrisy is exposed when he gets his hands on some money. But he’s always matter of fact. I got a note last night from my director, from our associate director, who directs in place of Bart, there was a moment where she said, ‘you’re doing something in this moment. I just want you to always remember you’re always Doolittle,’ like there was a moment where I kind of mimicked someone.
“I kind of put on a little voice. She said, ‘just remember, you’re always Doolittle.’ And I took that note and I processed it. And I said, I understand what she’s saying. Even when I’m imitating somebody or even when I’m like, kind of making fun of someone, you know, I still have to maintain my identity; I’m always who I am. She’s right, because Eliza is the one we see transform in this show. You know she said, we see you making that transformation, and it cuts into what she’s doing. So I think that’s the thing I love the most, that’s the most fun to play, is that he’s so unapologetically him.”
Hegarty also spoke about one of his big numbers, which is “Get Me to the Church on Time.” He also sings the classic “With a Little Bit of Luck.”
“It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s a very physical number,” he explained. “It’s rowdy, it’s raucous. It’s loud. It’s bawdy. It’s great. You know, I was talking to some of my fellow cast members and some of the newer ones because the ensemble in that number work just as hard, if not harder, than I do. I said there’s gonna be some nights, you know, especially on a two-show day, that we’re gonna get to that point in the show. And you feel like, ‘I don’t know if I have it.’ And then you get out there, and it just comes, it’s the way the number is staged, that number just explodes, and the audience as well, the reaction from the audience, it’s just amazing every night.”
Hegarty added that the director, Sher, really tries to go back to the source material of “Pygmalion” for this production.
“So obviously, the musical when it was written was based on George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion,’ which itself is based on a Greek myth about a man who falls in love with this sculpture from Greek mythology,” he said. “And so Bart, in this production, really wanted to preserve and honor Shaw. He had seen that, I believe it was like 1938 or something, the black and white film of ‘Pygmalion’ which, heavily influenced the musical, that particular film. And when Lerner and Loewe were writing this musical, I believe there’s a story that Rodgers and Hammerstein at some point, looked at ‘Pygmalion’ as a show to adapt, and I think Oscar Hammerstein said, ‘it can’t be done. You can’t do it.’
“And obviously Lerner took it, made it into a musical and wrote the book for it. And so without going into too much detail, the ending of the original musical was very different from the ending of ‘Pygmalion’ and they gave it the so called Hollywood Ending, kind of insinuating this romance between Higgins and Eliza that may or may not be there in the original source material. And so Bart really, without changing anything that Alan Jay Lerner did, without rewriting the ending, without doing anything different, he gives a nod to Shaw in Eliza’s coming back to Higgins at the end. So it’s a little ambiguous. It’s a little vague. The audience will walk out of the show saying, so what exactly happened there? What did that mean?
“The Eliza that has been created in this show in particular, she’s a different person at the end. And seeing the way Higgins treats her throughout the show, it’s not true to the character to have her walk back in and be like, ‘Oh, everything’s OK. I’m moving back and I’ll be your girlfriend.’ The movie I think is just as vague. It leaves it hanging there; ‘Where the devil are my slippers?’ Bart just took it just a step further than what everybody’s used to. And it’s funny when I come out of the theater at the end of the night, from the stage door, you know, invariably I’m passing by audience members on the way to my hotel or whatever. And sometimes they’ll still see me and recognize me or sometimes I’ll walk by them and they don’t even know who I am. I’ll hear audience members going, ‘So wait, what’s what happened in the movie?’ Our director said this too, she said ‘My Fair Lady’ is one of those shows that everybody thinks they know. They know because they’ve seen the movie 20 years ago or whatever. But then they realize that they maybe don’t know it as well as they think they did. And that maybe they don’t necessarily remember the ending the way they think they do.”
Hegarty also talked about what else audiences can look forward to during the show, touching particularly on Eliza’s performance of “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
“She has this huge breakthrough in her personal journey, and sings this song; again the way Bart stages it, it’s this celebration. You listen to the words ‘I could have danced all night,’ and it sounds like this romantic song. ‘I only know when he began to dance with me.’ You know? It sounds like she’s talking about him. You know, and I could have danced all night with him. But what she’s really doing is reveling in the sound of her new voice. And also you get this feeling that she wants to keep working, getting good at it, practicing and so she wants to stay up all night celebrating this accomplishment. And so when she gets to that point in the show, and sings that song to the audience, they’ve been waiting all night for this. It really delivers and the audience goes crazy. So those songs are there. The familiar ones that everybody knows. Even my song. I can’t tell you how many people I talked to, again, they knew the show or maybe they haven’t when they heard of it, or they say ‘Oh, I didn’t know that song was from ‘My Fair Lady,’ It’s one of those songs, everybody knows that song, they just don’t know where it’s from.
“So those moments are there. Like we talked about before the new things are there; the new discoveries. The ‘Pygmalion’ moments that people aren’t as familiar with that kind of surprised them, they go ‘Oh wow, Higgins is different from what I remember.’ So those new discoveries are there too, as well as the familiar.”
Hegarty added that he’s not looking too far into the future at the moment, as the tour goes through 2024, but that this is for sure one of his bucket list roles.
“I mean, I’ve done a lot of shows, and this is a hard show to top,” he said. “This role in particular, it’s one of these roles where, you know, if I never do another show ever again. I might be like, wow, you know, that’s a good show to go out on. It’s a great role. Last year when the choice was there, do I want to do another year or do I want to pursue other things, that was the the decision; I don’t know if I can top this.”
For more information on the tour, click here.
