Review
Excerpts
“a
magnificent staging of the hit Broadway musical… all the
elements fell blissfully into place and this certified near-antique
of a musical glowed with a professional luster.” --Daily
Pilot/latimes.com in its annual year-end piece which honored
the production as “best college show of 2002, Cohen as
“Man of the Year” for 2002, and Michael Morgan as
the year’s best actor for his portrayal of Henry Higgins.
"A CROWN JEWEL AT UCI. ‘Inspired’ is, indeed,
the word to describe the UCI production [which] is given a superb
rendition in all artistic phases – performance, music
and dance. …This is a “My Fair Lady” that
even those who have seen the show a dozen times will find breathtaking
and, dare we say it, ‘different.’ The ‘surprise
twist’ that Cohen has promised arrives at the last possible
moment and puts a new, quite plausible spin on Shaw’s
original scheme – a ‘Fair Lady’ for the 21st
century. The elegant UCI production… [is] a landmark in
the university’s theatre history.” --Daily Pilot/latimes.com
Director’s
program note
My
Fair Lady may be the greatest American musical of all time.
It’s also one of the oddest. Though it has a large singing
and dancing chorus, most of the choral characters have no direct
connection to the play’s main story (of which most of
them are largely unaware), nor does choral song and dance open
or even close the show, which is instead book-ended by its two
principals, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, who, uniquely
in musical theatre history, constitute the only characters on
stage during the last three scenes of the play.
More
surprisingly, while the play falls clearly within the genre
of romantic (musical) comedy, its two “romantic”
characters spend virtually all of the play fighting with each
other. And nothing they sing could remotely be called a love
duet.
What’s
going on here? Well, as most people already know (and as the
original Broadway poster made abundantly clear), My Fair Lady
is adapted from the text of George Bernard Shaw’s play,
Pygmalion, which (according to conventional wisdom) ends with
Eliza walking out on Professor Higgins. Moreover, Shaw declared
in a narrative sequel to the play that it would be “unbearable”
for Eliza to marry her Professor. In his sequel, Shaw even goes
on to say that Eliza eventually marries Freddy, runs a flower
shop in South Kensington Station, and then takes classes at
the London School of Economics!
Most
critics, taking Shaw at his word, have claimed that the musical’s
adapters have bowed to audience taste by bringing Eliza back
to Higgins’ house in the last scene, pasting-on a Shaw-reviled
“happy ending” simply to please the Broadway audience.
Thus Michael Billington, reviewing last year’s London
production of My Fair Lady in The Guardian, calls the musical
“a soft-centered betrayal of Shaw.”
But Mr. Billington is wrong. Shaw’s sequel is completely
facetious. Pygmalion, which Shaw himself called “A Romance
in Five Acts,” is obviously a romance from beginning to
end. And what is more, we can prove it.
First,
despite conventional recollection, Shaw doesn’t end his
play with Eliza leaving Higgins, either for Freddy or the London
School of Economics. In fact, Shaw doesn’t end his play
at all! Yes, Eliza, in her final appearance in the play, “sweeps
out” after saying, “I shall not see you again, Professor.”
But as she leaves, Higgins calls after her and tells her to
buy him some gloves, after which he “sunnily” (Shaw’s
words) proclaims to his mother, “she’ll buy ‘em
right enough.” At which point, he “chuckles and
disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner…”
and the play comes to a crashing halt! For unlike all Shaw’s
other plays, the end of the dialogue is not followed by the
word “curtain,” but simply with a series of asterisks
across the page – immediately below which Shaw cannily
announces, “The rest of the story need not be shewn in
action.” And he goes on to describe, in purely narrative
fashion, what he’d like us to accept as the logical conclusion
about what we’ve watched so far.
But this isn’t his conclusion. As with his mischievous
spelling of shown (Shaw spells it shewn because, in Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew, show rhymes with shrew), Shaw is once again
pulling our collective leg.
And how do we know he’s pulling our leg? By the title,
of course. For why, if the play is not the happily-ending love
story of a professor and his creation, would Shaw title it Pygmalion?
Pygmalion, as his classically-educated audience would know full
well, is the Cypriot sculptor of Greek myth who, falling in
love with his sculpture of Galatea, prays Aphrodite to turn
his statue into a living human so he can marry her. The goddess
obliges, and Pygmalion marries Galatea and even fathers her
children! Shaw’s title refers to this well-known, utterly-consummated
love affair between an artist and his art. In the famous Gérôme
painting of Pygmalion and Galatea, which Professor Goheen has
featured in our set design, the figure of Eros (Cupid) and his
archer’s bow even make their storied appearance. Shaw’s
play is indeed, as he states on the title page, “a romance
in five acts.”
Moreover, Shaw insisted that Eliza be performed, in play’s
premiere, by the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (nearing fifty
at the time), who was the love of his life.
Marry
Freddy? Ha!
