A loverly time: 'My Fair Lady' comes to Popejoy for six performances

Anette Barrios-Torres was a nerdy kid.

She’ll be the first to admit it.

“ ‘Pygmalion’ was one of the stories that I would read over and over again,” Barrios-Torres says. “I had an illustrated book. When I was eight, I became fascinated with the story because it’s a transformational tale.”

A loverly time: 'My Fair Lady' comes to Popejoy for six performances

By the time she was 10, Barrios-Torres was obsessed with “My Fair Lady,” the 1964 classic starring Audrey Hepburn.

“I was taken with it,” she says of the film. “What ‘Wicked’ was to a lot of people, ‘My Fair Lady’ was to my childhood.”

Flash forward to today and Barrios-Torres is starring in the national tour of “My Fair Lady,” where she plays Eliza Doolittle, the same role Hepburn brought to life on screen.

“To play a character that is so close to me, it feels like a friend,” she says.

The traveling show will make a six-performance stop at Popejoy Hall beginning Thursday, March 21, and running through Sunday, March 24.

The great playwright George Bernard Shaw perhaps realized the ramifications of a makeover better than anyone. He understood that in England’s rigid class society, a truly life-changing transformation could not be attained passively.

It required much more than improving one’s apparel and appearance, though both of those were important.

Upward mobility, he believed, could only be achieved if one had the intelligence, tenacity and commitment to learn how to speak “proper” English.

In his preface to “Pygmalion,” the funny, wickedly insightful play from 1913, that inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s beloved musical “My Fair Lady,” Shaw made the claim that his work about a professor who transforms a Cockney flower girl into a lady was essentially about phonetics.

The score contains now-classic songs as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “On the Street Where You Live,” “The Rain in Spain” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”

This is what also attracted Barrios-Torres to the musical and the role.

“Eliza is good at owning her space,” she says. “I used to wish to be like her when I was a kid. It wasn’t until I ventured into acting and theater that I wanted to be seen. Knowing that Eliza’s character existed gave me confidence to chase this dream.”

Stepping onto the stage as Eliza Doolittle felt like second nature for Barrios-Torres.

She jokes that she’s been training for the role her entire life by watching Hollywood classic films.

“I feel like being into old movies as a kid taught me so much old vocabulary,” she says. “Because I watched ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘Gigi,’ they had an elevated language. It’s brazen and bold. I also think it gave me a wonderful foundation for theater because everything back then was filmed as though it was still on stage. There’s a theatricality to those films. That’s why they are classic.”

Barrios-Torres says “My Fair Lady” is still very relevant in today’s world.

“I see Eliza as someone who is looking for a home, a place to belong,” she says. “She has vulnerability. She’s really trying to find where she fits. One thing that is brought to my attention is being Cuban American and Hispanic, I’ve seen so many people in my life change the way they speak to be accepted or feel like they belong. It’s fascinating being on tour and hearing what people find important about the musical. It changes from city to city, and that’s the way we learn about culture.”

Rehearsals started in October and the tour kicked off in November.

Barrios-Torres as Eliza Doolittle is new to the tour. Returning cast includes Jonathan Grunert as Professor Henry Higgins, John Adkison as Colonel Pickering, Nathan Haltiwanger as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Michael Hegarty as Alfred P. Doolittle, and Becky Saunders as Mrs. Higgins. Maeghin Mueller takes over the role of Mrs. Pearce, and Christopher Isolano joins the company as Zoltan Karpathy.

The production’s ensemble will feature Lauren Emily Alagna, Nick Berke, Evan Bertram, Nicholas Carroll, Shannon Conboy, Ryaan Farhadi, Andrew Fehrenbacher, Kelly Gleason, Jackson Hurt, Michelle Lemon, Derek Luscutoff, Ashton Norris, Jessica Ordaz, Rafa Pepén, Kumari Small, Charlie Tingen, Gill Vaughn-Spencer, John Viso, Gerri Weagraff and Mary Beth Webber.