My Fair Lady

London Coliseum                                                                     Until August 27, 3hrs

Rating:

This import from Broadway is, happily, full of Brits. Notably Downton Abbey and The Crown’s Harry Hadden-Paton, making his musical debut as Professor Higgins. (A terrifying task, given how the ghost of Rex Harrison still haunts the role.)

Vanessa Redgrave, as Higgins’s mother, proves there’s nothing like a Dame to posh up a cast. And then there’s Amara Okereke as the ‘guttersnipe’ Eliza.

The first black British actor to play the part, she’s a firecracker – common as muck, hilarious, full-voiced, and horribly hurt.

What a cultural mix this musical is. Alan J. Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music) were Yanks who distilled an intensely English musical from Irishman George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion.

The great news is that Bartlett Sher’s direction doesn’t bulldoze the show with politically correct disapproval of its blatant misogyny. And Okereke’s ethnicity deepens Eliza’s struggle to enter ‘society’ and master the rain in Spain.

Hadden-Paton’s young Higgins is very funny, if a tad too keen to be liked. At heart he’s a big baby, as Vanessa Redgrave makes clear by flinging up her hands in despair.

Malcolm Sinclair plays the sidekick Pickering – with a hint of a kink for women’s dresses. But this is just as much about Higgins’s transformation as Eliza’s.

I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face is all the more romantic for its lack of power ballad passion. The show is a joy to look at.

Catherine Zuber’s astonishing costumes are a riot of ostrich feathers and parasols at the Ascot races (where Freddy Eynsford-Hill – a bonkers Sharif Afifi – loses his heart to Eliza who famously yells at a horse ‘Move yer bloomin’ arse’).

The design scheme – plum, grey and mauve – is by Michael Yeargan, who conjures up a mock-elegant pre-war England on the cusp of catastrophe.

The Coliseum resident orchestra swells to fill the venue’s vastness and there’s a Baz Luhrmann-like riot of excess in the company knees-up with Stephen K. Amos as the strutting dustman Doolittle.

But I come back to Okereke’s boldness. Her performance saves this famous musical from its own datedness, giving it a living, fully female pulse.

Loverly!