West End revival of hit musical My Fair Lady heads to the Alhambra in Bradford

It has become so ubiquitous as to be used as a replacement for wit, so one tries to avoid what is now a cliché, but it feels appropriate to borrow and invoke the phrase here because, it is true, that Bartlett Sher has surely won the West End this year.

The American director has been at the helm of two major critical and commercial theatreland hits in the space of a few months in 2022.

First, in March of this year, the West End’s Gielgud Theatre saw the arrival of Sher’s staging of Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In a four-star Guardian review, Bartlett’s courtroom scenes, surely the most terrifying to put on stage given how large they loom in the minds of fans of the book and the Gregory Peck movie, were praised as ‘sensational’ and ‘filled with tension, anger, betrayal and disbelief’.

To have scaled the mountain of such a modern classic successfully and brought it to the stage was an impressive feat for the American director, but then he followed it up two months later with a similarly well received new production of My Fair Lady in the West End.

When we speak Bartlett is back in the US and he begins our conversation with a reminder that even those who appear superhuman are vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the time in which we live: the first thing I hear from Sher is a hacking cough on the other end of the line.

I hope it’s not Covid?

“Actually, it is,” says Sher.

He was struck down on a recent family break, ironically.