The Media Theatre is currently showing off something old and something new - much like the rejuvenated theater itself, a movie house until it was restored and reborn for musicals 14 years ago.
What's old: My Fair Lady, the company's season opener and the show that launched its new stage life in 1994, when the building became a legit house. Media's version of the classic is rich and sincere, and unusual, too, for the way it subtly emphasizes the love story that usually hides in the show's shadows.
What's new: A $110,000 high-tech sound system the theater has long and badly needed, freshly installed over the summer and - well, let's just note that when Eliza Doolittle threatens to execute Henry Higgins in the song "Just You Wait," she calls for a firing squad with intense clarity.
When the theater officially opened the musical Friday night, sitting in the front row, months away from his 100th birthday, was Walter M. Strine Sr., the man whose support - in time, energy, vision and money - kept the place alive in its early years of stage shows and now helps to push it forward.
Few theaters - either the buildings or the companies that stage shows in them - can boast an angel like Strine, a Media real estate mogul. If he takes personal pride in the 600-plus-seat theater, he should: As a teenage trade-school student, he laid some of its bricks before it opened in 1927 with the world's first talkie, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; as its savior in the '90s he invested more than $1 million to restore it to its current woodsy, English Renaissance style. Strine even polished each crystal of the theater's large, ball-shaped chandelier in the basement of his Media home.
For the last decade, Strine and his family have remained solid friends of the theater. When his for-profit production company - which produced the Media's musicals - shut down in 2000, he remained a supporter as the theater regrouped and became, like most regional companies, a nonprofit arts organization. The theater retained its director, Jesse Cline, who is today the Media's artistic director.
Strine mentioned to Cline a while ago that he'd like to see the theater revive its inaugural show.
"He already had decided My Fair Lady would be the show that opened the theater when he hired me to direct it in 1994," Cline said Friday afternoon, as the cast drifted in to hear his director's notes. "It's a great show, but why My Fair Lady? He said at the time that he loved the show so much, and here was his own fair lady, Elizabeth, and he wanted to dedicate the re-opening of the theater to her." His beloved wife, a piano teacher and organist, died six years ago.
With a new sound system - which Media is inaugurating along with new carpeting, a new musical director, Samuel Heifetz, and the purchase of a Media mansion to house the many cast members it hires at New York auditions - this seemed a good time to launch a new My Fair Lady, Cline says. Strine gave the theater $206,000 to produce it.
"If you're around Walter, then you like the Media Theatre," says Jeffry Cadorette, a vice president of Media Real Estate, the company of which Strine is patriarch. "This is one of Walter's loves and his desire is that it stay here - forever. That's always a struggle, for the Media Theatre or for any theater. But the theater is one of our passions. It's a jewel in the town and in the county."
Cadorette says that Strine, as one might expect, has good days and no-so-good ones. He is no longer in the office each afternoon, but his friends and associates visit him at home.
On Friday evening, after a so-so day, Strine departed at intermission. But he was there to hear a preshow curtain speech in which Tom Hibberd, who heads the theater's board, talked about Strine's constant involvement, and said the day marked what would have been the Strines' 77th wedding anniversary.
"We are facing hard times ahead," he said of the country's economic outlook, "and it's a big question, what's going to happen. But this theater already survived the Depression of the 1930s." Hibberd acknowledged Strine, to extended applause.
Cline is staging the revival on a set by Brenda Davis with a backdrop that serves as many locations, and with Kira Coviello's simple, bouncy choreography. The talented cast is handsome in Mary Ann Swords-Greene's period British snob-class costumes (except for Eliza's bum dad and his pals, of course, who look like hell even when they're trying to get to the church on time).
The production has a playfulness you don't find generally in My Fair Lady, and is hampered only by clumsy scene changes - quick but nevertheless distracting. Cline says he wanted a younger-than-usual Henry Higgins, the linguist who takes in Eliza Doolittle, a low-class flower girl, and bets with another man of letters, Colonel Pickering, that he can make her into a lady.
Ian Kahn, who sings Higgins with a wink in his voice, plays the role traditionally as her egocentric protector and nasty instructor - but also as a flirt (if mostly with himself). Yet it's clear, far earlier than usual, that this Henry Higgins is growing accustomed to Ms. Doolittle's face, and that his confirmed bachelorhood may be a defense and not a creed - that if he's not quite ready for love, he's surely ready for like.
The musical, from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, boasts a classic score by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner, and the cast delivers both solos and production numbers with an exuberance that honors the show. Elisa Matthews is a lovely Eliza, vulnerable and curious, and caustic when she needs to be.
Stephen Bonnell's reading of Colonel Pickering is more as a man invested in Eliza's success and less a muddleheaded old soldier, as the character is generally played. Sharon Alexander and Katherine Mallon-Day are wonderfully long-suffering as Higgins' mom and maid, and Bev Appleton is an Alfred Doolittle you'd be happy to be kicked out of a pub with. Patrick Ludt, as Freddy, the idle rich boy with a fix on Eliza, sings "On the Street Where You Live" just so, as the most selfless "I want" song in American musical theater - which it probably is.