A revival of the 1930s musical Me and My Girl is an effervescent delight.
Picture a combination of My Fair Lady, P. G. Wodehouse, and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan and you’ll have some inkling of what a delight it is to experience Me and My Girl, a two-and-a-half hour blast of pure twinkling Champagne.
Me and My Girl, the 1937 musical by Douglas Furber and L. Arthur Rose, who wrote the lyrics, and Noel Gay, who supplied the music, was substantially revised in the 1980s and given a general spiffing-up by a young Cambridge graduate with a Wodehouse fixation, Stephen Fry. At a loss for a leading lady, the producers took Fry up on a suggestion that they cast his friend from college theater, Emma Thompson, who delighted London theatrical audiences and soon became a movie star. That production lasted eight years and transferred to Broadway for a three-year run.
Me and My Girl is playing at New York’s City Center through Sunday as part of the long-running Encores! series, which brings classic productions back to the stage for brief runs, sometimes inspiring full-fledged follow-up productions on Broadway. Broadway’s second-longest-running musical ever, the current revival of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, began as a City Center Encores! show in 1996.
I’ve seen a dozen or so of these 75 “semi-staged” productions over the years, and they vary widely in production value. Some have minimal set and costume changes. Sometimes the performers simply stand downstage at stationary microphones and perform while reading aloud from scripts they hold in their hands. Me and My Girl is a full-blown production, though, with adorable sets, a huge cast of nearly three dozen, a large orchestra, and many costume changes. As of opening night, everyone was already “off-book,” having memorized their parts.
The show takes place in an idealized English country estate in the 1930s, where the presumed heir to an earldom discovers to his chagrin that the previous earl had a secret marriage and a legitimate son who is the rightful heir to the property at Hareford, should he be declared fit and proper to hold the title. He turns out to be Bill, a free-wheeling Cockney chancer from working-class Lambeth played elastically by Christian Borle, who has quickly become a Broadway mainstay after starring in the recent musicals Something Rotten! and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Bill, with his plaid trousers, grating accent, and generally uncouth manner, is Eliza Doolittle without the self-pity.
Or maybe it’s his fishmonger girlfriend Sally (Laura Michelle Kelly) who is the real Eliza here. Both of them are enticed by the prospect that he might soon become rich enough to afford lots of scent to cover up the smell of fish she carries with her. Yet as the guttersnipe Sally is an unsuitable match for an earl, the terrifying Aunt Maria, Duchess of Dene (Harriet Harris) plans to roust her from the premises and set up Bill — now called William — with the scheming, beautiful Lady Jaqueline Carstone (Lisa O’Hare), who intends to be the mistress of Hareford, even if marrying William is the price she must pay.
As Bill scampers around stealing watches and dropping his H’s, it’s evident that his manners don’t quite work at the manor. The more aghast the lords and ladies become, the more he delights in mocking their airs and graces. “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” he cries. When someone says, “Aperitif?” He says “No thanks, already got ’em,” pointing to his incisors.
The combination of 1930s-style gags and Fry’s varsity wit keeps the show relentlessly effervescent, a dizzy dream for any anglophile.
For the impish Borle, it’s a perfect part. He plays the role much as Fred Astaire would have, capering nimbly around the set and pulling off an elegant pas de deux with a light fixture in the second-act number “Leaning on a Lamp-Post.” Kelly makes for an agreeable leading lady, and a subplot about how the stuffy Sir John Tremayne (Chuck Cooper) plots to woo the Duchess inspires a suitable level of hijinks.
The musical numbers aren’t classics, but they’re hummable and daffy, notably the droll Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style patter song “The Family Solicitor,” in which the lawyer in question (Don Stephenson) explains his craft, and the first-act closer “The Lambeth Walk,” in which William teaches the entire cast a silly line dance and the mischief bubbles off the stage and spills out into the audience.
The combination of 1930s-style gags and Fry’s varsity wit (I loved a joke about how Cockney rhyming slang might be adapted to blank verse) keeps the show relentlessly effervescent, a dizzy dream for any anglophile. To adapt its hero’s favorite toffee-nosed swear word, Me and My Girl is a bally good time. May it return soon to Broadway, and never depart.