My Fair Lady  
London Coliseum  

SHIPPED over from Broadway, director Bartlett Sher’s adaptation of My Fair Lady is the first major West End revival of Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical for 21 years – and one that fully justifies its three-hour duration; never dragging, never dipping in intensity nor waning in entertainment value.  
 
Sher gets almost everything right – the pace, the feel, the balance between humour and drama, the tenor of the song and dance scenes, even some subtle upgrades that bring the piece into a more modern focus.  
 
However, it’s the choices of casting director Gordon Cowell that have really made the show, with its three main figures – Amara Okereke, Harry Haden-Paton and Malcolm Sinclair – all burning brightly.  
 
Okerere, in her highest profile role yet, is bewitching as Eliza Doolittle, softening and maturing along with her vowel sounds yet never losing her combative sense of self, while Haden-Paton plays Henry Higgins with an almost autistic eccentricity and Sinclair, as Colonel Pickering, brings as much to the party with his witty, unspoken reactions as with his actual words.    
 
The musical numbers are, of course, wonderful – who could go wrong with the likes of Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, I Could Have Danced All Night and On the Street Where You Live? Yet here again Sher demonstrates great judgement, allowing full rein to the powerful voice of Tom Liggins (as Freddy), for instance, while judiciously bringing the chorus to the foreground when the less impressive tones of Stephen K Amos (as Eliza’s dad) are required.  
 
To cap it all, the set by Michael Yeargan is almost edible, with Higgins’s gorgeous wood-panelled drawing room as its centrepiece and the rest of 27a Wimpole Street coming into view periodically as time passes with revolutions of the house.   
 
Catherine Zuber’s costumes, too, are dazzlingly elegant, and when Okerere emerges just before the interval, transformed in a stunning ball gown with jewellery to match, the audience gasps in emotional appreciation at the beauty of it all.   
 
Really there are very few weak points in this production; little to be quibbled with, not much to regret, and only one or two points that leave it short of five stars. It’s a fantastically enjoyable interpretation of a great musical.  
 
Runs until August 27: eno.org/whats-on/my-fair-lady