Interview: Michael Hegarty of MY FAIR LADY at Robinson Center

Just in time for my birthday (thank you Celebrity Attractions), MY FAIR LADY is taking the stage at Robinson Center this Friday, May 19, through Sunday, May 21, and I couldn't be more excited! Winner of Outer Critics Circle Awards including Best Revival of a Musical and was nominated for 10 Tony AwardsⓇ including Best Musical Revival, 5 Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical Revival and 3 Drama League Awards including Best Musical Revival, this musical will have you singing about the Rain in Spain well after you leave the theatre.

So, when I was asked if I wanted to interview Michael Hegarty, who plays Alfred Doolittle, I immediately said yes! How fun is that?! I was honored to be able to speak to this talented performer who plays this larger-than-life character, that I'm sure will stick in our hearts for a very long time.

BWW: Good morning! We are excited that you guys are coming to Little Rock

Michael Hegarty: I'm excited too. It's my first time. I'm looking forward to it.

BWW: Little Rock is a great city, especially if you like history and dining.

MH: I think we're probably going to go to the President Clinton Library. There's another actor on the tour, and he and I go to all the presidential libraries that we encounter. This will be our fourth one.

BWW: That's a great idea! Ok, so tell me a little about the show.

MH: Sure, so the show is the Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady directed by Bartlett Shar. The show opened in 2018 in The Lincoln Center Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, and I'm not sure when the first national tour launched, but I believe it was sometime in the Fall of 2019. Then, of course, they shut down for 18 months or so during COVID. I think they were one of the first tours to go back out on the road after COVID.

BWW: That was brave.

MH: It must have been an incredible time! So, then their tour ended around July of 2022, and we started rehearsals in Paducah, Kentucky, in September 2022, opened there in October and have been out on the road since then.

BWW: Well we are thrilled that you all are making a stop here in Little Rock. What are the plans after this weekend?

MH: We leave Little Rock and go to Colorado Springs, where our first year on tour will end, which is a week from Friday.

BWW: Oh my goodness!

MH: Yeah, and then the tour will be on hiatus for four months, and then we'll come back in the fall and go into rehearsal in Boise, Idaho, in October. After that, we'll be back on the road for those of us who will return.

BWW: Wonderful! So, for those of us who have not seen the show, tell us about it.

MH: Our production of MY FAIR LADY is a revival of the show that opened in the 50s with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. Most people that will be coming to the show will primarily remember the movie with Audrey Hepburn, which stuck pretty close to the Broadway production.

BWW: How does this show differ?

MH: Our Director Bartlett Sher is known for taking a so-called fresh take on a show. He looks at a show as if it's never been done before and directs a brand new production. So, when directing MY FAIR LADY in the 21st century, it's going to be a little bit different than the approach that was taken in the 1950s. Gender roles were, of course, very different in the 50s than they are today, and having not been there myself through that rehearsal process, I only know about it peripherally through the rehearsal notes that we were privy to when we were rehearsing the show with Bart. He was with us for a little less than a week in Paducah, so we got to work one-on-one with him, which was a real treat to be directed by him. We were really fortunate.

BWW: That is so cool!

MH: This is my second show with Bart. I was in the national tour of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, and we didn't get that time with Bart, because he was working on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD on Broadway at the time, but I guess he had some downtime between CAMELOT and all the other shows this time.

BWW: What happens when the director isn't there?

MH: We have Associate Director Samantha Saltzman whose job is to recreate Bart's show. She has a giant book of all of his notes, all of his dramaturgical research, all of his blocking, and had videos of the Broadway show, the London show, because he played in the West End as well, and also of the first national tour. Our show had to go through some slight changes as far as the physical set of the show, because some of the theaters that we're playing are smaller than the Broadway stage. We had to change some of the staging around, for example, our show doesn't have the revolving stage. I saw the Broadway production, so I got to see that, and it was very cool the way that happened, but we had to change that, because we couldn't do that, which presented an obstacle for those numbers that had to go without having a turntable. So, that was interesting. Luckily, I wasn't in any of those musical numbers, so I didn't have to worry about that. It looks great, and the audience doesn't know the difference, obviously, unless they saw the previous production.

BWW: Working with Director Sher sounds amazing!

MH: He really knows the world of the show, right, so the other thing that he really brought to the show was MY FAIR LADY THE MUSICAL is based on PYGMALION, the play by George Bernard Shaw, which was written in 1913, and he really wanted to bring the Shaw into his production. So this MY FAIR LADY feels a little bit more like PYGMALION in a lot of ways. For instance, which I won't go into because you have to see the show, but the ending of the musical is very famous and very often debated as to what exactly Lerner and Loewe are trying to say because they changed the ending of PYGMALION. Eliza marries Freddie and leaves and goes off, and Henry Higgins laughs about it as the curtain drops. But, of course, on Broadway and in Hollywood, you know, you can't have that. You need a happy ending, right, where the audience wants a love story. They wanted Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle to be in love. Of course, they kind of added in this layer, and so Bart tried to kind of go back to what Shaw was originally telling in this story, that there was not a love story, but that it was placed upon the story, overlaid on the original story. It's implied, you know, he's a man, she's a woman. Even the name Pygmalion is based on the Greek myth about the artist that falls in love with his statue. So it's implied there that that he creates this woman and says 'You're my God...you're a whole new person... you're a new woman... I like you like this.' She transforms into this new person, and he's kind of interested in that, you know. He sees her in a new light, but he's also been very mean to her for two and a half hours, and again that goes back to the 20th century with this very domineering man, who is kind of a bully, kind of a jerk, and very condescending, you know. So, Bart, without changing a word of dialogue, is able to bring this fresh new take on this Golden Age piece. Eliza is very different in the movie. When you watch the movie and she's going through all of the exercises and being trained to change her speech, it almost comes across like a torture chamber. It's like she's being put through all these horrible things, but in this show, she's the one initiating this. She wants this. She seeks him out, finds him, and gives him money. It's all her, because she wants a better life and believes that this is the way.

BWW: Girl power! I love it. So, tell me about your part in this story.

MH: Alfred P. Doolittle is Eliza's father. My character serves as a constant reminder throughout the show of where Eliza comes from. She comes from lower class and comes from the poor side of London where they talk a certain way, dress a certain way, and act a certain way. She sells flowers on the street, because that's how she makes her money. That's how she lives, and there's all kinds of implications there, too, about selling things on the street. There were women who sold "flowers," and she has a lot of lines where she's saying 'I'm a good girl... I just wanted to sell them a flower.' She doesn't want her character destroyed just for speaking to a gentleman.

BWW: I can understand that.

MH: Alfred is a dustman, which is essentially a garbage man. He spends all his money at the pub drinking and talking his nonsense to whoever will listen. He's kind of a philosopher, a barfly, a philosophical souser. He'll talk and tell his beliefs to anyone who is listening. When we first see Alfred encounter Eliza, he's asking her for money so he can go back to the bar. There is a line where one of his buddies says 'you haven't talked to her in months,' which implies all kinds of things about how he grew up and having to fend for himself growing up on the streets. He thinks 'she's my daughter and I'm entitled to her money.'

BWW: Do we get to boo you?

MH: It's funny- the audience loves this guy. It's really funny, because of the way the character is written, there's something so charming about him and people feel like they know him. Maybe he reminds them of their father, their uncle, or somebody in their life. There are lines and it's implied that he's rough with her. At one point he goes to the house, and she's acting mad, and he tells the professor to just give her a few licks of the strap-- that's the way to straighten her out.

BWW: Noooooooooo

MH: Right, but the audience still loves him.

BWW: Oh my goodness. Booooooooo!

MH: It's very interesting. I'm a largish person and our Eliza is a smallish person, so when I grab her by the arm, you know, I'm gigantic next to her, and you would think that the audience would see him as another kind of bully, but even with Higgins when he's bullying her and stuff, he gets laughs when he's mean to her.

BWW: That's horrible!!!

MH: But the show does work because of the reactions that she gets when she sings her big song. When she comes out for her final bow, the audience just goes crazy, because she wins them over. We did a performance, I believe it was in Dallas, and there was a large group of young girls, probably 12/13 years old, and they went crazy for her. I think that they really got it. They got that story about this young woman, because Eliza is like 20 years old. The actress is 22. I think Julie Andrews was like 19 when she first did it, but in many other productions, she's played by an older actress so the audience perceives her as being 30 or something like that, but our Eliza's is 20.

BWW: That makes sense.

MH: So, the young female audience members, I think, really relates to her, and as far as my character, I think the audience feels like they know him, they've seen guys like this. They know guys like this who like to drink, who likes to loaf around, who likes to do as little work as possible. The big number for me is Get Me to the Church on Time, where he has no reason, no excuse not to marry his partner that he's had for a long time, but if you really listen to the lyrics, you know he doesn't wanna get married.

BWW: Shocking!

MH: Yeah, one line is 'drug me, jail me or stamp me and mail me, but get me to the church on time.' What he's saying in the song is I'm gonna drink my face off and I'm relying on all of you to make sure I get to the church on time, because I can't get myself there. I don't wanna be there, and I'm gonna be so drunk party all night, that I won't even know who I am. He starts throwing money around and everybody is happy to take it. I guess you could say it's a bachelor party, and it's a great number. It's very bawdy, very physical and there's a lot of dancing. My character doesn't dance as much, thankfully, but there are dancing girls and all kinds of stuff going on, and it's definitely one of the highlights for me as an actor, because the audience really responds to it. It's really fun. It's definitely one of those songs where, you know, on those nights where you feel like 'oh man, I don't have another show in me-this will be the eighth showing of the week,' and you're really feeling it, that number just gets me up again, and then the way it's staged, I always say that the number feels like it's happening to me. Everybody's pulling me in all these directions, and everybody's dancing around me, and that I can't help but to be pulled into the number. It's really, really incredible.

BWW: That sounds like so much fun! I love that. I can't wait to see that!

MH: Oh yeah, it's a great show.

BWW: So tell me a little about yourself.

MH: I'm from New Jersey, grew up in central New Jersey.

BWW: You don't have the accent.

MH: It comes and goes. If I talk to my mother on the phone for more than 10 minutes, it'll come back. I've been acting since I was a kid. I literally auditioned for the first play that I was able to audition for in school, which was in 7th grade. Our school put on a production of DAMN YANKEES, and I auditioned for it. Nobody ever told me to do it, not even my parents. I went and did it myself, because it was in me, I can't explain it. It was something that I've always wanted to do, so I pursued that, and, you know, I've been acting in some capacity ever since I was 12.

BWW: When did you get to a point where you thought 'this is it- I'm an actor'?

MH: I think it was before FIDDLER ON THE ROOF where I played the Rabbi. I got my MFA and was teaching college, and then my teaching job dried up. They eliminated the position in 2018, so I went out and got some new headshots and started auditioning, and that's when I got FIDDLER. Then, I came off of FIDDLER, and I immediately started booking TV work and qualified to join the Screen Actors Guild union. Once you have that union card, that's the real mark that you're a professional actor.

BWW: That is so cool. So what are your plans this summer?

MH: I am not doing theatre this summer, but I do have an agent, and I have done some television work.

BWW: What have you done?

MH: Most recently, I shot a very small part on Disney Plus called Better Nate Than Ever, which is about a little boy who auditions for Broadway musical.

BWW: I've seen that!

MH: Before that, I did a show, but that only lasted for one season and was canceled. It was with Edie Falco from The Sopranos called Tommy, where she played the first female chief of police in Los Angeles. I played a detective on that show.

BWW: Oh wow! Well we are super excited that you are coming to Little Rock. Thank you for speaking with me today! I will see you guys on Friday!

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