The Broadway production, and its new lead, brim with life, onstage and off.
Allan Corduner talks to Laura Benanti before they go on for the Ascot scene in “My Fair Lady” at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York. By Peter Marks Peter Marks Theater critic Email Bio Follow March 8 at 11:30 AM Applying makeup at her dressing table as a movement therapist works on her neck and shoulders, Laura Benanti contemplates the mountain she’s about to scale.
The door opened in the midst of the run of this hit revival — which opened nearly a year ago as a production of Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Bartlett Sher — after the departure in the fall of its original star, Lauren Ambrose. It’s only the second time in a Tony Award-burnished Broadway career that Benanti, mother of a high-spirited 2-year-old named Ella, has “replaced” in a musical.
“How you holding up?” asks the V.I.P. allowed into her dressing room minutes before the 2 p.m. curtain. Benanti looks up to see her friend Lin Manuel-Miranda, who’s popping in between rehearsals deep in the bowels of Lincoln Center for a benefit performance of “Camelot,” in which he’s playing King Arthur. Phones are pulled out for that sacred ritual: proud-parent-photo-sharing. Miranda once composed a cool rap for a Web series of Benanti’s; now their conversation veers to topics such as poop.
But now, more than two months later, the production exudes that sense of deft suaveness customary to the genteel age that “My Fair Lady” — based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” — epitomizes. The amount of finery required to maintain this magnitude of refinement is itself awesome: 10 people employed as dressers and two as full-time stitchers to handle more than 300 costumes for a cast of 37.
A scene during a matinee performance of “My Fair Lady.” At 91, Rosemary Harris handles her comic scenes as Henry’s long-forbearing society mother with the same audience-relaxing security Benanti brings to “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Backstage, she huddles with Hadden-Paton and giggles with Corduner, awaiting only the aid of an arm for an entrance. It was at the urging of her daughter, actress Jennifer Ehle, that Harris agreed to succeed Diana Rigg in the production.
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