<p>Tinkering with a beloved musical is risky business
</p>
<p>By William A. Henry III
</p>
<p> Before the revisionist My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, Richard
Chamberlain went on the warpath, trying to get his co-star sacked
in favor of her understudy. Without having seen the understudy--but having endured Melissa Errico's hapless Eliza Doolittle--one can be sure Chamberlain was right about her. Rarely has
a plum Broadway role been so ineptly handled. While Errico sings
gloriously if unimaginatively, she is an unconvincing Cockney
whose linguistic foibles wobble from syllable to syllable, quite
a handicap in a show about the social importance of accents.
She is plausible only in two feminist-flavored moments, denouncing
Chamberlain's Henry Higgins as heartless in the first act and
reviling him as a sexist pig at the end.
</p>
<p> In a version also saddled with Julian Holloway's cutesy capering
as Eliza's debauched father, Dolores Sutton's vamping as Higgins'
mother and sets that make the Covent Garden flower market look
like a Florida condo in mid-construction and render Higgins'
study fit for a Vincent Price horror flick, Chamberlain shows
calculated charm and wit. He sings better than Rex Harrison
and looks terrific. His best scenes are with the normally bland
Pickering, whom Paxton Whitehead makes droll.
</p>
<p> The schizoid staging reflects director Howard Davies' determination
to do something new vs. the insistence of the estate of librettist-lyricist
Alan Jay Lerner on replicating the 1956 staging. Most impiously,
Davies hints that Eliza leaves Higgins forever, as in Shaw's
Pygmalion. That idea fights the musical's text and, indeed,
its boy-meets-girl form. The text and form win the brawl. But
