IF you know the Sheffield Crucible only as the home of the snooker world championships, then think again.

Artistic director Daniel Evans and chief executive Dan Bates (who previously held the same post at York Theatre Royal) have been named the 18th most powerful players in the British theatre industry in The Stage 100 list.

What’s more, the judges for those awards in the weekly entertainment magazine named Sheffield Theatres as the Regional Theatre of the Year. No mention anywhere of York Theatre Royal and Riding Lights’ remarkable resurrection of the York Mystery Plays, but we’ll leave that gripe for another day.

Evans’s glorious revival of My Fair Lady exemplifies why Sheffield is in vogue. First, the Crucible brought The Wire star Dominic West back to his home city to play a Yorkshire-voiced, shirt-shedding Iago in Othello in September 2011.

Now Evans casts the 43-year-old Old Etonian in his first musical theatre role as the perfectly pucker Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical twist on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

West  is a younger Higgins than he image that comes to mind, but then that image is Rex Harrison, who of course played him and played him until the vowels came home. West is no great shakes as a singer, being more of a talker-singer of perfect enunciation, but that suits the role.

Despite the occasional, surprising stumble over the order of words, his Higgins is just as you would wish: brazenly over-confident, outrageously if consistently rude, and as dapper as he is dastardly – until Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Carly Bawden) teaches him a lesson or two of his own after he takes up the bet of Colonel Pickering (Anthony Calf) that Higgins can tutor her into being passed off as a duchess.

Evans devotes the opening to implanting London’s Covent Garden market into the capital of the South Yorkshire republic with excitable choreography by Alistair David that later leaves the ensemble flat on its back, panting and exhausted but exhilarated after Get Me To The Church On Time.

In truth that routine is the highlight of the second half, but that is always so because Lerner and Loewe stack up pretty much all the goodies in the first half, from Eliza’s Wouldn’t It Be Loverly? to Doolittle (Martyn Ellis) and raucous friends’ With A Little Bit Of Luck and Higgins, Eliza and Pickering’s The Rain In Spain.

The script is at its subversive wittiest in that half too, and the visual panache peaks with designer Paul Wills’s exquisite cream, rose-dedecked hats for the Ascot Gavotte. Just when you think the show can’t surely top that, Louis Maskell’s sweet singing of Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s On The Street Where You Live is even more uplifting.

The breathtaking production’s impeccable standards remain just as high post-interval, especially David’s choreography, even if the thrilling highs of before cannot be matched. Nevertheless, West brings just the right increasing humanity and vulnerability to Higgins and Barden announces a talent to watch as Eliza fights to establish her own destiny.

Wouldn’t it be loverly, in turn, if this show’s destiny were to be a London transfer?

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