Photo: Oslo Nye Photo: Oslo Nye Photo: Oslo Nye

CONRADI NEWS From 30. January 2003 until Easter, Conradi will play the lead role in the musical "My Fair Lady". He will be the youngest actor ever to play Higgins, at the age of 31. MY FAIR LADY Music: Frederick Loewe Lyrics & Book: Alan Jay Lerner Perhaps the most popular musical of the 1950s, My Fair Lady came into being only after Hungarian film producer Gabriel Pascal devoted the last two years of his life to finding writers who would adapt George Bernard Shaw's 1914 play Pygmalion into a musical. Rejected by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Noël Coward, Pascal finally turned to the younger but very talented duo of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. The story revolves around Eliza Doolittle, a coarse little peddler of flowers in Covent Garden who agrees to take speech lessons from phonetician Henry Higgins in order to fulfill her dream of working in a flower shop. Eliza succeeds so well, however, that she outgrows her social station and--in a development added by librettist Lerner--even manages to get Higgins to fall in love with her. My Fair Lady opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on March 15, 1956 and enjoyed a run of 2,717 performances which lasted more than nine years. The original production featured Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza. The 1964 film version starred Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway and Audrey Hepburn. MY FAIR LADY - review The story about the poor girl who ended up with professor Higgins to learn how to talk and act correctly, is now on Oslo Nye, premiere 30 January 2003. Kåre Conradi and Heidi Gjermundsen play Higgins and Eliza HIGGINS OG ELIZA The first thing I have to say is that Henry Higgins in an impressively unlikeable guy. He's one of those men you hope you never meet. Ever. He can't pay someone a real compliment if he had a gun to his head. He may be well spoken, but has either manners or charm, and spreads sarcasms like a farmer spreads seeds on the field. The role of Higgins is played by Kåre Conradi, a man most people have a totally different impression of, and still people around me were fuming when he sang "why can't a woman be more like a man?" and called Eliza everything from "unsanitary fleamarket" and "stinking cloak rat" and "primitive disaster area" that "sounded like an old cow" when she speaks. I was convinced. This brings us on to Eliza Doolittle, here played by Heidi Gjermundsen. Eliza is a girl from the gutter who wants to sell flowers in a decent flowershop instead of in the streets, but has to learn how to talk correctly before it can happen. In this case it's quite a task. Nothing sounds quite right, she has wrong pronounciation, uncorrect words and swears like a construction worker. Both of the lead actors have voices suitable for a musical, and to the part they're playing. Gjermundsen's pure tones against Conradi's slightly rough and laid-back style makes them fulfil each other both character-wise and vocally. IMPRESSIVELY SARCASTIC The sarcasms between the two are incredibly funny. Higgins is so cynical and dry that you can't help but laughing, and he talks very loudly about Eliza being just a bet. Songs about women being like the plague and should be more like men, are convincing in the beginning, but as time goes by he has trouble convincing - himself. After failing to convince the posh people a couple of times (maybe especially at the races where Eliza told a horse to "get it's f***ing arse in gear"), she finally convinced everyone at a party several months after the experiment started. This is where it gets interesting. Higgins' facade is starting to fade, Eliza is popular amongst men and all of a sudden he's along and doesn't understand why he isn't satisfied. Charming expressions such as "The point isn't that I treat you badly - but have you ever seen me treat anyone else better?" isn't quite convincing Eliza's hurt ego, and he concludes that she's a "night owl who cannot take my shining prescense". CONCLUSION I almost wish the whole play wound surround around the conversations between Higgins and Eliza. The driving force in this play is definitely how Eliza goes from a girl from the gutter to a lady, and how Higgins goes from being a selfish a-hole to becoming dependent on the girl who previously meant nothing to him. ***** CORDOLA NEWS Cordola is currently writing music for the new Nancy Sinatra, House Of Lords, Mr Big and Alice Cooper albums.