'My Fair Lady's' Makeover.

Is "My Fair Lady" a period piece? At first glance the Lerner and Loewe musical, now enjoying a sumptuous revival at Britain's National Theatre, seems anachronistic. Based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play "Pygmalion," the musical chronicles how, through the power of elocution, Eliza Doolittle is transformed from a common cockney girl to a society lady. The play's obsession with niceties like rounded vowels seems antique in a Britain where hereditary peers can no longer sit in the House of Lords and aristocrats like Guy Ritchie (better known as the man who married Madonna) mask their privileged roots by affecting gangsta slang.

Yet Trevor Nunn's marvelous new staging, which opened in London last month, makes the play seem fresh. Earlier Elizas like Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn had to disguise their cut-glass accents during the first few scenes, putting on faux cockney during Eliza's "squashed cabbage" phase. But Nunn cast Martine McCutcheon, a British soap-opera and pop star--and a genuine working-class actress--as his Eliza. Orchestrator William David Brohn has trimmed the swooping strings from Frederick Loewe's score; the result is a bolder, funkier sound, even for numbers like Henry Higgins's misogynist rant, "I'm an Ordinary Man." Choreographer Matthew Bourne makes the toffs paw and whinny like horses at Ascot, and rescues the Cockney partying number--"With a Little Bit of Luck"--from cheeky cuteness by rendering it as a raucous garbage-can tap dance.

In some ways Britain hasn't changed much since the era depicted by Shaw. In economic terms, the Victorian story of Britain as not one but two nations--one rich, one poor--rings truer than ever. The gap between the incomes of the richest and the poorest has again begun to widen in the last five years. A 1999 study by the London School of Economics found that child poverty has increased dramatically since the 1960s: as many as one in three children lives in poverty, compared with one in 10 in 1968.

But in so many other ways Britain has been transformed. Status consciousness has replaced class rivalry as society's driving force. Titles no longer dazzle: stale chronicles of blue bloods are strictly for the blue-rinse set. The tabloid industry thrives on tales of aristocrats in rehab and royals on topless beaches. For the young, people like ...