By Dale Bass

Staff reporter

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com

When Kaylee Harwood was young, one of her favourite movies was My Fair Lady.

She’d watch Audrey Hepburn learn to enunciate “h” under the watcful eye of Rex Harrison.

Sometimes she’d pull out the soundtrack — with Julie Andrews singing the role Hepburn had in the film — and belt out those songs that have become deeply engrained in the history of musical theatre.

And that’s why playing Eliza, the Cockney woman who is transformed into a “proper lady” is such a delight for the Vancouver actor.

“This is one of the roles that has been on my list for a long time,” Harwood said.

“I had the entire script memorized when I was a kid.

“It is just one of those roles that is so transformational, one of the roles that is in the canon of musical theatre for women.”

Harwood said she loves the “meatiness” of playing Eliza and revels in every word she speaks during rehearsals.

“To be speaking such amazing, intelligent language written by George Bernard Shaw is incredible,”

Harwood said.

My Fair Lady is based on Shaw’s play Pygmalion and the musical’s creators, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, “wisely just lifted the best parts of Shaw’s writing for their script,” Harwood said.

Steven Greenfield, who plays Zoltan Karpathy — a rival linguist seeking to show Eliza to be a fraud — agreed the script is one of the play’s strongest assets.

Equally strong is the way Lerner and Loewe sewed the play together, creating a seamless musical filled with songs that have become classics.

In fact, as the cast rehearsed in the Pavilion Theatre, Western Canada Theatre (WCT) general manager Lori Marchand sat on the sidelines, quietly singing along.

Marchand said she’s excited watching the play, which opens on Nov. 26, come alive.

Musicals are key to the WCT’s annual seasons and this one is eagerly anticipated.

It’s built on the adaptation WCT artistic producer Jeremy Tow created while he was at the Chemainus Theatre Festival.

Greenfield noted the foundation Tow built has been built upon by director David Adams, a man with extensive experience in creating musicals like Showboat, Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard.

Adams spent three seasons working at the Shaw Festival in Ontario — giving him up-close exposure to the works of Shaw — and has acted in The X Files and Little Women.

Adams is “honouring Jeremy’s vision for what he wanted for the show,” said Greenfield.

The 13-member cast also makes up the orchestra and virtually every actor plays an instrument at some point during the play — “making them all quadruple threats,” Greenfield said.

The musical talents are essential, since there are four major singing or dancing productions in the show.

One of those scenes is perhaps Haywood’s favourite although, when asked which part of the play appealed to her the most, she wasn’t sure she could choose just one.

“Show Me,” she finally said.

It’s been a favourite since she was young, performing it in recitals and now that she’s living out an acting dream, to sing it to Eliza’s would-be suitor is ideal.

“It’s a great journey of a song,” Harwood said. “She keeps singing show me, and you would think it’s not much but she’s taking out her anger toward [Henry] Higgins on this innocent bystander.”

And, when the curtain goes up at the Sagebrush Theatre next week, the woman who once spent childhood weekends pretending to be Eliza Doolittle gets her chance to be the Fair Lady.

You can bet she’ll show them.

Tickets are available at the Kamloops Live Box Office, 1205 Lorne St., 250-374-5483 or online at kamloopslive.com.