The Musical My Fair Lady Received a Modern Make-Over at Overture November 21-26: Taking Advantage of Every Opportunity
Above: A scene from My Fair Lady, which was performed November 21-26 at the
Overture Center.
Right: Kumari Small who played Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s sister Clara as well as
acted as a part of the ensemble.
by Jonathan Gramling
While Kumari Small, a musical theater actress who performed in My Fair Lady at the Overture Center November 21-26, grew up in Southern California in Manhattan Beach near the LA Airport, she didn’t grow up wishing to become a star, but got bitten by the acting bug in high school.
“There was definitely a lot going on around me,” Small said. “I didn’t necessarily start my career in musical theater until high school. But growing up, I definitely did go to ballets and got to be in dance recitals and stuff. I just joined a school musical. They were doing ‘You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown.’ And I wanted to see if I was any good at it. And then I joined the cast and got the lead. And I just really loved it. I just felt something that I never felt before performing. That’s when I realized, ‘I think I can do this.. I think I can be okay at this and I think this is going to be my career.’”
Small began her theater training at Fullerton College. Everything was good until the pandemic hit her junior year and everything was done on Zoom.
Small cut her acting teeth in regional theater and then got her first national experience in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. She seemed destined for the part she played since she was able to send in an audition tape and the call-backs were held in Southern California. Still, about a year ago, Small decided to make the plunge and headed for New York City.
“Here and there, I’ve had to do the starving artist thing,” Small said. “I’m really lucky with my agency. They’ll schedule the auditions for me so that I don’t have to get up super early in the morning and hopefully I can be seen. But I definitely have a lot of boundaries living with the auditions so that I don’t have to do the starving, struggling, suffering artist thing. My agent brought me in for My Fair Lady. I had a really great call-back process. And I got the offer a few weeks after that.”
Small landed the role of Clara, the self-absorbed sister of Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and is also a member of the cast ensemble. Rehearsals began on October 12th and they were already on the road by mid-November. At the beginning of November, they were performing live.
“We are having our first audience,” Small said about the evening of our interview. “I’m definitely feeling the excitement and I know the rest of the cast is going to be buzzing with excitement all day.”
While the original cast of My Fair Lady starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison was a British cast, this was not your parents’ My Fair Lady.
“We do have a lot of representation from all sorts of walks of life, which is very nice,” Small said. “With this production, it’s always been fairly diverse. I think Bartlett Sher did a great job of making sure that it was cast accurately too. It probably reflects what London was actually like and not making all of the people of color be the servants. He feels like people are more accurately represented and intentionally represented with the people that they cast. They brought that into the tour casting with our current director.”
While Small’s character Clara is featured on stage once, Small makes the most of it, just as Clara would.
“ Clara is a very fun character to play,” Small said. “I like to say that she is the most popular girl in school. She has a little bit of a moment in the Ascot Gavotte, which is one of the songs in the show. I really take that moment to make Clara the center of attention and adored by all the men on stage. I would say that Clara is a little full of herself, but probably not super obsessed with herself. But she definitely loves the attention she does get, wearing all of the pretty jewels and going to all of the social events. She just likes the attention and being adored.”
While My Fair Lady has the same story line, it hardly has the same message that it did when if first came out in the 1960s.
“I think My Fair Lady is an extremely powerful story with beautiful elements, topical elements of musical theater that everyone loves,” Small said. “At the end of the day, it’s a super powerful story about female empowerment. No it’s definitely not your mother’s My Fair Lady. I love how it explores all sorts of new scenes that I personally would have never expected out of a production like this. I, myself, I get to be a drag king in a number, which is something that I never thought I would do on stag. But it is definitely interesting and it is a lot of fun. I enjoy it and I know the audience is going to feed off of that and have a great time.”
And the director and the cast bring their own modern perspective to the production.
“It is amazingly represented by some of the best talent that I have ever seen in my life,” Small said. “The songs are definitely memorable. There are some people in this cast who grew up watching the movie. And it is so exciting to see them just fall in love with the story all over again and fall in love with these new interpretations of the songs. It is new phrasing from what they knew in the movie. I think it is just a really beautiful thing to see. I think a lot of audiences and other people who also grew up with watching the movie will have that same experience.”
While Small will be touring and performing and keeping up with a very demanding schedule that is physically challenging, she never forgets that she has a life outside of theater.
“I’m very lucky to have toured before,” Small said. “And with that, I took a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge that I had from that tour going into this one. I miss being able to talk with my family and my best friends every day. It really helps that we have our ways of checking in with each other in a way that I don’t have to pull myself out of something and I don’t want to disrupt them and they don’t have to disrupt me. We check in with each other every so often. For me personally, I find that journaling really helps. Being able to have a space-time call with my best friends really helps as well. I let them know how I am doing. I can get an outside perspective if I am feeling bad.”
When asked what her dream role would be, Small didn’t hesitate in responding.
“In terms of theater, my ultimate dream role is Maria in the Sound of Music,” Small said. “I love Julie Andrews. I definitely would love to play Sarah in Ragtime as well.”
“With a Little Bit of Luck,” plan to see Kumari Small in Broadway shows for years to come as her musical theater career begins to take off. She is destined to become “My Fair Lady” of the musical theater scene.
