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Daltrey On "My Fair Lady"



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August 2, 2003 
By James Verini, Special to The Times 

Stomping and strutting like a peacock around a rehearsal space on a
shabby corner in Burbank, Roger Daltrey looks like nothing less than
the eternal youth of rock 'n' roll embodied. The once and future
frontman for the Who and a bona fide rock demigod, Daltrey seems only
slightly dulled from that summer 34 years ago when he belted out "I
Can See for Miles" at a little concert called Woodstock and
permanently redefined the way rock singers were supposed to work.

In Burbank, Daltrey still is wearing his tight jeans and a dirty shirt
(or at least a shirt made to look dirty) and cursing like a London
metalworker, which is what he happened to be before he became a rock
star in the mid-1960s. He's still every inch the musician, giddy one
moment, sullen the next, though he never appears ready to ram a snare
drum through the wall. His neck muscles still bulge and his blue eyes
scream. And at 59, Daltrey, who in the era-making Who anthem "My
Generation" once stuttered "Ho-ho-hope I die before I get old," seems
in better physical shape than most of the men in their 20s dancing
behind him. That he happens to be rehearsing "Get Me to the Church on
Time," a number from "My Fair Lady," is, Daltrey insists, nothing to
be surprised about. And no, the song's lyrics - "There's just a
few more hours / That's all the time you've got" - don't strike
him as particularly weighty, given his age.

"The rehearsal period is 10 ... days! That's dangerous! That's when
you're most alive," he says, during a break from rehearsal last
Saturday. Of the musical itself he adds, "I love the music and I love
the writing."

Daltrey will play Alfred P. Doolittle, the drunken London dustman and
moralist, in a one-night-only performance Sunday of Lerner and Loewe's
1956 musical at the Hollywood Bowl. His agent suggested him for the
part in late May - Daltrey says he auditioned; the Bowl people
say the part was his for the taking - and before he knew it,
Daltrey was aboard, only eight weeks prior to show time.

To participate, he took a break from "Extreme History," a History
Channel series he's hosting in which he and a camera crew revisit the
exploits of adventurers through the ages. In the latest segment, they
paddle up the Colorado River in a 19th century-style wooden boat ` la
John Wesley Powell. "In a ... wooden boat!" says Daltrey, who splits
his time between Los Angeles and England, where his wife and eight
children and eight grandchildren live. "They were extraordinary
people, these explorers."

Is he a history buff?

"No," he says, adding nothing.

But Daltrey is just being modest or, as he would put it,
unpretentious. For an unwillingness to show off or speak too much
about himself has always marked this Hammersmith laborer's personal
style. Although he puffed out his chest and swung his microphone in
sync with guitarist Pete Townshend's string-breaking windmills,
although he still wears that knowing smirk when, during "Baba
O'Reilly," he looks out on the crowd and pronounces it a "teenage
wasteland," Daltrey always was unpretentious. He and bassist John
Entwistle, who died a year ago last month, left the Who's preening and
higher artistic ambitions to Townshend and drummer Keith Moon (who
died in 1978).

In fact, Daltrey is a part of history himself - the Who,
numerous breakups and reunions notwithstanding, will turn 40 next
year. And he does know a lot about history. He's smart and, for the
man who once snarled at an English talk show host, "Rock 'n' roll
don't got no future!" is shamefully well spoken when he chooses to be.
It's just that he's reluctant to dwell on history. The working-class
lad from the Who, he just wants to keep working.

"My Fair Lady" is based on George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," about a
wealthy London gentleman, professor Henry Higgins, and his efforts to
improve Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, and her father,
Alfred. The play caused a sensation when it premiered in London in
1916.

"It's a great study of Edwardian morality," Daltrey says. "[Alfred] is
quite happy to be poor. Americans find it very difficult to understand
the English class system, but money doesn't buy you out of it. You're
either upper class, middle class or working class. Now I might be a
multimillionaire, but I'm still working class. Whereas America is
classless. You're either rich or you're poor."

John Lithgow, who will play Henry Higgins to Daltrey's Doolittle on
Sunday, says the singer is a "diamond in the rough."

"He's a little hesitant as an actor, although completely confident as
a musical actor," Lithgow says.

For Daltrey, it's not a matter of choosing between acting and singing.
"I don't think about it. It's my life, it's what I do."

How do being a rock star and performing in a musical differ?

"Rock 'n' roll is jazz," he says. "It's free, especially the way the
Who play. In a musical like this you can't go free form - it
would be a train wreck."

How are they the same?

"I haven't done it yet, so I don't know," he says.

But he has. In 1969-70, he toured in "Tommy," the rock opera ("Billing
'Tommy' as a rock opera was terribly pretentious of us") about a deaf,
dumb and blind pinball wizard. He took the production, which Townshend
revived in 1993, all the way to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In
1975, he starred in Ken Russell's film version of the musical. After
"Tommy," Daltrey says, he received a lot of adulation in Hollywood and
elsewhere. He didn't want it, he says. "I never wanted to be a star."

He appeared in a 1998 production of "A Christmas Carol" at Madison
Square Garden and a 1995 Lincoln Center production of "The Wizard of
Oz," whose eclectic cast included Nathan Lane, Jackson Browne and
Jewel. He played the Tin Man.

Although he says the Who "will always be the most important thing in
my life," Daltrey spends far more time acting these days than singing.
He has nearly 60 film and television credits, ranging from BBC
productions of "Beggar's Opera" and "Comedy of Errors" to episodes of
the show "Highlander" and a straight-to-video horror film called ".com
for Murder," in which he starred alongside pop singer Huey Lewis. He
even made an appearance as a teacher on "That '70s Show."

"I can earn a living as an actor," he says. "Every year I can make a
living at it. Not many people can say that. It's had its ups and
downs, its painful moments. I've made a lot of bloopers. You've got to
remember I was an extremely famous young man in the rock world -
I couldn't make my mistakes in private. But I got through it, and I've
learned the craft, and I've now become a good actor."

Still, when asked about rock stars becoming actors, he says, "I don't
think it's a natural progression. It's very difficult for people to
accept rock artists in the acting world. It's really difficult,
especially for someone like Mick [Jagger], whose stage persona in a
rock band is almost caricaturish. It's so huge - and rock
demands that. It demands this incredibly large image. As an actor you
just have to lose that."

He's been offered a role in a West End production of "Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang" in London, but he says, "I think I'd get bored. I'm very
much a gypsy. I've always been moving. That's the great thing about
rock 'n' roll, you're always moving. The longest run the Who ever did
was a five-day stint at Madison Square Garden."

That Daltrey would want to appear in "My Fair Lady" at first seems as
incongruous as the fact that he has eight grandchildren. But on closer
inspection, the role of Alfred Doolittle is oddly well-suited to him.
"This is my grandfather," as Daltrey puts it. Doolittle begins as a
soused-up London laborer and ne'er-do-well - as Daltrey did -
who can't "afford morality." But unlike Daltrey in his youth
(and perhaps still), Doolittle bears no grudge against the upper
classes as long as they keep him in drink. That is, until the Henry
Higginses of the world - the intellectuals, the critics -
find him fascinating and proclaim him "a philosophical genius of the
first order" for his resigned attitude. Doolittle comes to seek
admiration, and then money and marriage. And then it's all over for
him.

"Alfie Doolittle got a lot of money, and it [messed] him up," Daltrey
says. "That kind of pedestal adulation of the Beatles - the Who
have never had that. Or we had it for a few years, but we fought
against it. We're a blue-collar people's band, and I'm glad we've
maintained it."

But the question has to be asked: Wasn't it in part against grandiose
musicals such as "My Fair Lady," and its stodgy best-picture-winning
film (released in 1964, the year the Who was formed) that rock 'n'
roll and the Who were reacting? "It's about what we were reacting to,"
Daltrey says. "The British class structure. Saying, 'We're not going
to take it' to these upper-class twits. But it was so much easier to
kick it down then."

But then he adds: "As I never saw the movie, I guess I couldn't rebel
against it."
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- SCHRADE in Akron

Every scientific truth goes through three stages: first, people say it
conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before;
lastly, they say they always believed it. 
	- Louis Agassiz (1807 - 1873)