Bartlett Sher’s award-winning production of My Fair Lady comes to the Wales Millennium Centre this week. Ahead of the show’s run in Cardiff, Hari Berrow caught up with musical theatre legend Lesley Garrett, who plays Mrs Pearce the housekeeper.
Cardiff is the second leg of My Fair Lady’s nine-venue tour of the UK and Ireland. Lesley Garrett starts by telling me about how it’s been so far.
“We started in Bradford – my home county – which was lovely. We did two weeks there, getting the show up and running, then we went to Dublin and that was amazing. I feel very at home in Ireland – as I do in south Wales actually – because music is part of the community, as it was when I was growing up here in south Yorkshire. There were lots of brass bands from the mines and choirs and amateur operatic societies, and it’s the same in Dublin and it’s the same in Cardiff. People just have music in their blood, you know?”
The tour is a remount of Bartlett Sher’s 2018 production, which has previously played at The Lincoln Centre on Broadway and the London Coliseum. As the show was already prepared, Sher took a step back from the rehearsal process. Garrett says that stepping into a remount has been a new experience for her.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever taken anything over, so that was a new experience for me. We worked with Bart’s associate director, a wonderful woman called Jenn Rae Moore. We were also very lucky with our deputy stage manager, Rachel Phillips, because she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the detail of the piece. Rachel and Jenn between them really put the show together.
“We were very faithful, of course, to Bart’s original direction, but with his permission, Jenn allowed us to make the parts our own, because obviously, Bart wanted what we had to offer. I think that was quite a challenge for Charlotte [Kennedy], who plays Eliza – she had been the understudy in the Coliseum, so she learnt it the way Amara Okereke did it. Charlotte had to be encouraged to make the role hers and not reproduce somebody else’s version of it, which is what, as an understudy, she had to do before. So that’s been lovely, to see Charlotte blossom and develop and grow.
“The wonderful Maureen Beattie played my role, Mrs. Pearce, at the Coliseum. They recast it for the tour but, fortunately for us, the ensemble all agreed to continue and do the tour, which has been a godsend. They’re unbelievably talented – I’ve never been in a company where each individual could play a soloist in their own right. And they’ve guided the four new cast members: myself, Michael D. Xavier, John Middleton, and Adam Woodyatt.”
Sher didn’t step away from the production entirely, however. The cast had rehearsals with him early in the process.
“Bart very kindly came over and worked with us, which was lovely of him – he’s very funny, lots of fun to work with. I was a bit cross with him to start with because he’d asked me to do Mrs Pearce in a Scottish accent – in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion [on which My Fair Lady is based], she’s Scottish, and he wanted to be very faithful to the original play. Bart asked if I would learn to do a Scottish accent. I said, ‘can I not just do it in my Yorkshire, love?’ but he said ‘no, I want you to do it in Scottish!’ So I had lessons with a Scottish accent coach through the summer.
“We have a little cottage in France, and were there for the summer with friends and family. I would disappear off into the back bedroom and they could all hear me going [Scottishly] ‘Mr. Higgins! What are you doing with her?!’ And I did get very good in the end! Anyway, I got one day into rehearsals – one day! – and Bart said ‘Gee, Lesley, could we just try your Yorkshire? I’d just like to hear it.’
“I gave it a go – ‘oh, gee, that’s fantastic, that’s so authentic! We’ve got to have her Yorkshire!’ I thought ‘you bugger, I’ve just spent the whole summer learning to speak it in Scottish and I could have done this for nothing!’ Authentic? Course it’s authentic, I’ve been doing it for 60 years! That was funny, but yes, a bit frustrating at the time.”

Sher’s production shifts Lerner and Loewe’s iconic musical into the world of Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Garrett reflects on some of the reasons why Sher chose to reintroduce aspects of the original work.
“It was ahead of its time. He was such a feminist, Bernard Shaw, and he was so ahead of history in the way he championed women. I mean, if you look at the piece, it’s all about strong women: Mrs Pearce, Mrs Higgins and of course, Eliza, first and foremost, are all just incredibly strong, determined women. I [Mrs Pearce] run Henry’s household; Mrs. Higgins is the person that he runs back to the whole time for advice and help. And Eliza, in the end, has him completely round her little finger.
“Shaw also championed the suffragette movement, and Bart has very cleverly woven that into the piece. We see a march, a suffragette march. That’s music to my ears because the last thing I did for Welsh National Opera, of course, was Rhondda Rips It Up. It’s nice for me as a follow-on in Cardiff because we’re still talking about women’s lib and women’s issues and women’s suffrage, it’s just the most lovely connection.”
While Garrett has enjoyed enormous success as a soloist and leading lady, she tells me that this role has been a unique opportunity.
“I’ve just had the most wonderful time. Many people have said, ‘well, why are you doing it?’ because I only get four bars to sing. Of course, I’m singing along with all the chorus bits – wherever it says ‘servants’ chorus’ it’s now ‘Mrs. Pearce and the servants’. I’m really enjoying singing all that glorious music, but there are several reasons I wanted to do this piece.
“First of all, the score is an absolute masterpiece. I’ve always hated the way that people think that musical theatre is in some way inferior to opera. It absolutely isn’t – and I’ve never thought that because I’ve done both all my life. Lerner and Loewe’s score is a complete – there’s no other word for it – masterpiece, and it’s based on one of our greatest playwright’s greatest pieces.
“The idea of playing a character part for the first time fascinated me – and the part is a strong woman, and I always like to play those. It’s a very new experience for me, not really having a singing role, but there was so much about the production that is magnificent. The sets of the costumes are out of this world: it’s a very high-end production. It’s a beautiful, beautiful piece to be in.
“I knew Michael Xavier as well – I’d worked with him before and loved him to bits – and I was also very keen to work with Adam and John because they are predominantly television actors and I thought I could learn a lot from the way they performed.’
Garrett says that, while many see her musical theatre and opera work as separate, the former has had a huge influence on the latter.
“I’ve always found, working with musical theatre people and television people, the quality of their acting is in many cases better than you find in the world of opera. I do think that’s something opera is still working on: making it more credible from an acting point of view. It’s difficult because the effect of opera singing on the body makes it very difficult to act naturalistically. That’s a whole area I think we’re only just coming to terms with in the world of opera. The physicality of an opera singer is very different from that of a musical theatre performer or a straight actor: you create the sound with your own body, it’s therefore much more athletic and that makes naturalistic acting quite difficult. It’s something I might try and teach later because I’ve seen it on every level now.”
My Fair Lady is not an exception to the rule: Garrett remains keen to take on roles where she can learn something.
“Always, always, always. That’s always been the case! That’s what fascinated me about it all in the first place, the depth of opera is immense. The historical operas, the librettists, the relationship between librettist and composer – Hofmannsthal with Strauss, Da Ponte with Mozart. Generally speaking, I would say opera is more sophisticated in terms of its writing, but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. Of course, every opera Mozart wrote is a masterpiece – but so is My Fair Lady.
“My job as a singer is to find the right style for each composer. I don’t sing Mozart like I sing Lerner in Loewe, but neither do I sing Bach like I sing Puccini. So it’s a question of getting inside each composer and librettist and finding out what they want, what their style is, what they are expecting from me, what quality they want from me. What does this character demand from me, but before that, what do the creatives demand?
“It’s very exciting when you’re at the point where you and the character are one and there is no gap. That takes a wee while, but we’ve got there now – when I walk on the stage, I’m Mrs. Pearce. It does help that she’s from Yorkshire!”

Maintaining variety in her career hasn’t always been easy for Garrett. She’s often had to fight to keep her place as an interdisciplinary performer.
“I remember there was a period in my life when I was doing a lot of musical work and I missed opera. A friend of mine, Christine Chibnall, is director of planning at Opera North; I asked her, ‘Christine, why am I not being offered opera anymore?’ and she said, ‘we thought you’d given it up!’ I said, ‘why, just because I’ve gone to do musicals?’ So, very kindly, she allowed me to come back to opera, to do La Voix Humaine – which is one character on her own, for 45 minutes, on the stage with a telephone. That is probably the best piece of work I’ve ever done, and the most challenging. It taught me a huge amount.
“That led to me gaining a small platform to challenge young composers to write for older women. Christine and I were looking for parts that would champion women; in traditional opera, older women – older sopranos, certainly – just do not feature. Part of that is practical: years ago, when the traditional operas were being written, women quite often would lose the tops of their voices with the menopause. Elderly sopranos didn’t really exist, but now they do. We’re finding, through better training and in some cases HRT – not for everybody, but for some that helps keep the voice from dropping – there are many very talented older sopranos. But there are no roles for them.
“So I challenged the young composers and said, if you want opera to be credible and have relevance in a modern world, you have to write about modern society, and write roles for older women. We run countries, we’re captains of industry, and we are bloody powerful! We have to feature in the society that opera creates. I was very fortunate that I was listened to, and I had several roles written for me as an older woman.
“My favourite was Val, the toilet attendant in Mark Simpson’s opera Pleasure. Pleasure was set in a gay bar, and dealt with a lot of modern issues: mental health, gay rights, abuse in the home. It was a wonderful piece and that again, taught me a huge amount.”
Garrett is hugely excited to be back on the road and to bring the show to Cardiff and beyond.
“It’s extremely high quality, it’s very well acted and sung. I think audiences will go away from the show uplifted, happy, and surprised – because the ending is not like the film. They’ll go away marvelling at what they’ve seen, at the talent there is on the stage, at the joy there is in the company.
“I hope they’ll go away with a renewed respect for George Bernard Shaw, who is the wellspring from which this whole wonderful experience has grown. Essentially, we all hope that the audience will go away inspired.”
My Fair Lady, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Tue 8-Sat 26 Nov.
Tickets: £19.50-£78.50. Info: here
words HARI BERROW
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