Even an ordinary ‘My Fair Lady’ will leave you happy

You need to accept one not-so-unpleasant fact before you can enjoy Writing on the Wall Productions' "My Fair Lady": This is very much a community theater level enterprise. It doesn't soar, it doesn't bore. It succeeds on its own amateur terms.

During most of the evening, I kept being reminded of how timeless the Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe score and much of Lerner's script (based on George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion") is. Young flower girl Eliza Doolittle wants to be a lady. The ego-laden but brilliant phonetics expert Henry Higgins accepts a bet that he can transform her life by improving her speech. He does. But he finds there's more to people than just language.

Loewe's Viennese-flavored music and Lerner's sometimes wistful lyrics give the story a subtext of romance missing from Shaw's play. This may be the most sexless love story Broadway's ever seen.

Director Elena Ferrante-Martin and her 25-member company (some roles are double-cast) are alumni from Bishop Gorman High School. The group's premiere production offers some unexpected pleasures: a well-sung, musing "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" by Jacqueline Fayeghi as Eliza; a crisp sense of kind but no-nonsense dignity by Christina Matthews as Henry's mother; a comical, slightly overstated gentleness by John Wennstrom as Henry's friend, Col. Pickering; and Nick Manfredi and Matthew Tratos as two drink-loving bums who seem to genuinely enjoy the benefits of street living.

Most of the cast, though, have not yet mastered the rudiments of acting. We can't really follow the story because Fayeghi and Adam Unger (as Higgins) are not able to project their characters' moment-to-moment thoughts. We never understand what their relationship is about.

Most of the actors superimpose character traits and walk with undisciplined focus. This strikes me as not entirely the fault of thespian inexperience, but rather of a director who doesn't yet know how to tone down excess. Rarely did I understand what was making a particular character perform a particular action.

We look to "My Fair Lady" for visual opulence, but the look here is often plain and borderline dreary -- for reasons that have to do with lack of creativity as opposed to budget.

Tammy Pessagno's choreography, though, is skillfully simple. I particularly enjoyed her small, delicate hand and facial movements that said a lot about a character's emotional state.

This is an ordinary production of an extraordinary work, and I found it easy to go home happy.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.