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My Fair Lady: Komische Oper Berlin

About the Event

See Katharine Mehrling, multiple award winner and a firm favorite with Berlin audiences, as the stubborn and charming Eliza Doolittle, and Max Hopp as the eccentric Professor Higgins in one of the most popular musicals of all time.

Professor Henry Higgins, a leading expert in phonetics and a passionate defender of proper elocution, makes a bet with the similarly‐minded Colonel Pickering: using the young flower girl Eliza Doolittle, who can only express herself in the coarse dialect of the lower classes, Higgins wishes to prove that the brilliant polish which proper elocution provides opens the doors to the highest echelons of society. Yet what Higgins forgets on his path to success is that Eliza is no guinea pig, but a person – with and without an accent!

In his acerbic criticism of the rigid class structures in 19th‐century England, the author of the literary template for My Fair Lady, George Bernard Shaw, drew on the ancient myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with an idealized woman he has carved out of stone. Director Andreas Homoki, the artistic director of the Zurich Opera House, has found grand poetic images for the worlds which separate someone like Eliza Doolittle from the »better society« of someone like Professor Higgins, and in his production fully emphasizes the musical and dramatic qualities of this 'perfect musical'.

The fact that an elocution exercise set to music – 'The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain' – remains a perennial favorite to this day says everything you need to know about the enchanting power of Frederick Loewe's immortalized melodies.

Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and the film by Gabriel Pascal (1956). Book and song texts by Alan Jay Lerner.

Cast / Production

Musical Direction: Peter Christian Feigel
Staging: Andreas Homoki
Choreography: Arturo Gama
Stage Design: Frank Philipp Schlößmann
Costumes: Mechthild Seipel
Dramaturgy: Johanna Wall
Chorus: David Cavelius
Lighting: Franck Evin

Professor Henry Higgins: Max Hopp
Eliza Doolittle: Katharina Mehrling
Alfred P. Doolittle: Carsten Sabrowski
Oberst Pickering: Christoph Späth, Tom Erik Lie
Mrs. Higgins: Susanne Häusler
Freddy Eynsford‐Hill: Adrian Strooper
Mrs. Pearce: Christiane Oertel
Professor Zoltan Karpaty: Zoltan Fekete

Chorsolisten der Komischen Oper Berlin

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