At the age of six, Amara Okereke became obsessed with My Fair Lady and spent her childhood idly thinking wouldn’t it be loverly to one day play Cockney ‘guttersnipe’ Eliza Doolittle — one of the Crown Jewels of musical roles.
And, by Jove, she’s got it!
Okereke, 25, has been chosen by Broadway director Bartlett Sher to play Eliza at the London Coliseum in May.
Downton Abbey star Harry Hadden-Paton will take on Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetics expert who bets that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess at an embassy ball by the time he’s finished giving her lessons in elocution and deportment.
Hadden-Paton played Higgins in Sher’s acclaimed production at Lincoln Center three years ago.
Vanessa Redgrave has agreed to play Mrs Higgins, his mother.
Amara Okereke, 25, has been chosen by Broadway director Bartlett Sher to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady at the London Coliseum in May
I was lucky enough to see My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center a couple of times with Diana Rigg and Rosemary Harris playing the matriarch.
It shouldn’t be a big deal that a black actress is playing Eliza — for the first time in a first-class production — but it’s a signal moment, a point that Okereke acknowledges.
‘I know the feeling of seeing someone like you do the things that you actually want to do. I know how inspiring and validating that is. Now I’m doing the very things that I thought were very unlikely,’ she told me, noting that The Phantom Of The Opera now has a ‘black Christine’.
She thought of her 13-year-old self having a trip to London with her mother to see a show at a time when no actress of colour would have played the lead in a revival of any golden age musical.
‘If I’d been told that was something I could expect to see, I’d have said, ‘You must be lying,’ because that’s not the world I knew. Yet here we are being a part of that world. It’s really exciting.’
Sher told me that it was a ‘high priority’ of his to find a person of colour ‘who can sing those notes’. And Amara can.
Okereke became obsessed with My Fair Lady at the age of six and now she will be playing Eliza. Pictured: Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady in 1964
She has an expansive vocal range, plus she knows the score well, having watched the film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison more than 200 times, and listened to recordings of Julie Andrews, the original My Fair Lady.
‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly was basically the song in our house,’ she said. So much so that she chose to perform it for a song-and-dance competition.
She had planned to follow her parents into medicine but got the musical theatre bug.
Nonetheless, she continued with her academic endeavours before deciding to study at ArtsEd drama school in West London.
It was drilled into her that after graduation, she would end up unemployed for about three years. Not so. Cameron Mackintosh and his team cast her as Cosette in Les Miserables.
‘I was very aware that there had never been a black Cosette before,’ she said.
‘You can’t help but think about that.’
She landed other top parts in The Boyfriend and, more recently, in Spring Awakening at the Almeida.
Director Sher said during one of our conversations that it ‘could be very interesting in our era now to see this show completely differently following the kind of changes we’ve all been through, especially in a place like England where you had Meghan Markle come into the Royal Family and go through it,’ he said.
‘That’s a very similar parallel,’ he observed of Eliza and Meghan, where an outsider ‘goes into that world’. Amara said that having Meghan in mind ‘would add to what this production means and why it’s happening now’.
George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion was adapted into My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe for stage and screen in the 1950s and early 1960s, and subsequent major revivals have resonated with audiences in different ways.
Harry Hadden-Paton (left) and Vanessa Redgrave (right) will star alongside Okereke in My Fair Lady
‘We’re more and more questioning barriers and social constructs,’ Amara said, adding that the story of class will always be relevant.
Though she now lives in London, Amara is a Yorkshire lass through and through. ‘We drink Yorkshire tea exclusively in this house,’ she said proudly.
I’ve watched Amara in several shows and she is just as comfortable in racy fare such as Spring Awakening as playing the wide-eyed innocent in The Boyfriend at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
It’s worth tracking down a YouTube video of her singing Make Someone Happy which she performed at The Stage Awards in 2019.
My Fair Lady is going to look magnificent at the Coliseum, home to the English National Opera. And Amara will be very much at home with Hadden-Paton and Dame Vanessa.
Maureen Beattie has been cast to play housekeeper Mrs Pearce, with Sharif Afifi as love-struck Freddy Eynsford-Hill.
- My Fair Lady will run at the Coliseum for a summer season from May 7.
Stage hit morphs into a movie
The art world has been drawing in on the Young Vic Theatre thanks to the scorching word of mouth for Anthony McCarten’s play The Collaboration, about the friendship and rivalry between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Then there’s the cast: Paul Bettany, away from the boards for 25 years, is Warhol; and Jeremy Pope, a rising star from Broadway and Hollywood, is Basquiat.
Both are breathtaking in a drama that explores their relationship and attitudes to race, money and sex. But McCarten is going to tear up his play script and rewrite it as a screenplay.
Anthony McCarten’s play The Collaboration is about the friendship and rivalry between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
McCarten — who also wrote the films The Theory Of Everything, Darkest Hour, The Two Popes and Bohemian Rhapsody — says the film version of The Collaboration will feature the same two actors because ‘their chemistry is unbeatable’.
He added that usually on a film, there is little time to develop a rapport.
So it has been advantageous for the actors, along with director Kwame Kwei-Armah, to have spent so much time rehearsing and performing first.
The hope is that the movie can shoot in New York later in the year, then the stage version will play in that city.
‘Maybe it could come back to the West End after that?’ McCarten wondered.
