ONE of musical theatre's best-loved shows will be packing out the Arts Theatre's stalls in Cambridge all next week in one of the highlights of the local amateur drama calendar.
The Cambridge Amateur Operatic Society are used to big musicals - last year they took on Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore- but now they've chosen their toughest challenge yet.
My Fair Lady, the love story which is based on George Bernard-Shaw's Pygmalion and was made into a cinema classic with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, will require the group to stretch their acting talents as well as their singing voices.
"You get your money's worth with this one," says seasoned musical theatre director Alistair Donkin, who returns to the city once again to stage the show. "It's a fantastic play and the music is sometimes almost incidental.
"The words are all important in this one, it would work just as well if you took the music away.
"I though it might be a challenge but they have really risen to it. I knew the music wouldn't be a problem because they are used to doing operettas but this is real acting."
The cast will have been in rehearsals for four weeks before the curtain goes up for the first night on Tuesday. But the cast were so enthusiastic about the production they were already well prepared before their director arrived.
"When I got here they had already learned the music and the words," says Alistair. "I've never known a group to be this prepared. They might as well be a professional group."
The Cambridge Operatic Society has been putting on shows in the city for 95 years and returns to the Arts Theatre every November with a professional director and a cast of the city's finest singers.
Their choice of My Fair Ladyfor this year's extravaganza comes at a time when the show is enjoying something of a revival.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first performance on Broadway.
The show starred Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in the lead roles and was an instant hit, going on to run for 2,717 performances and break the Broadway record.
It was soon made into a film and Andrews was replaced by Hepburn as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle.
The story sees phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins take on the rough-spoken Eliza as his own pet project. He aims to teach her how to speak and act like an English lady.
"It's just such a magical play," Alistair tells Scene. "If you were to stage it in the current day rather than the period it is set in then I think Higgins would be a computer geek living in a college in Cambridge, I'm sure there are professors like that in the town.
"His sole interest is creating a new language for Eliza but he realises there's a difference between language for language's sake and language being spoken by the woman he loves."
My Fair Lady opens on Tuesday and runs until Saturday, December 2. Tickets are £10-£20.
To book, call (01223) 503333.
23 November 2006
First appeared in the Cambridge Evening News