On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
fOn STAGE Shaw's 'Pygmalion' Is Turned Into a Delightful Musical By Joseph T. Shipley My Fair Lady. From Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Music by Frederick Loewe....
...Presented by Harman Levin...
...Staged by Moss Hart...
...The Chocolate Soldier...
...What matters is not how I behave to you, but that I behave the same way to all people...
...But by then the approval has embraced the whole production...
...In that role...
...The lavish spread of the musical permits its authors to add arabesques and gay cavortings all around this story...
...But the fact that we wish for more indicates the quality of what we're given...
...More naturally blended with his role is Robert Coote...
...It would have been pleasant to hear Eliza confounding the suspicious Budapest speech expert, rather than just watch the brief dumb-show as they dance, then hear about her success...
...Bernard Shaw Arms and the Man, produced in 1894, was transformed 15 years later into one of the most delightful and popular musicals of this century...
...The creator is cap-live in his creation...
...sometimes mischievous, as in the cockney corker, "With a little bit of luck...
...The lyrics are both deft and in good taste...
...Frederick Loewe has provided varied and lively airs, bacchanal and hymeneal, cockney call and castle waltz...
...As his mother, Cathleen Nesbitt watches with charming, almost aloof amusement the impending fall of her son...
...Choreography by Hanya Holm...
...In America, they haven't spoken it for years...
...My Fair Lady glows through an evening of enchantment...
...Hanya Holm with the dance sequences, Moss Hart in the overall direction, have roused the excellent company to a top performance, so that to the solid story has been added the flicker of many lights of wit and beauty...
...There is a moral for the artist in this tale, as well as the wit, the satire, the sling of life...
...By contrast, we are told, the French don't seem to care what they do, so long as they pronounce it properly...
...Such an attitude adds to the final joy when Higgins in his turn is subdued...
...As Professor Higgins, who takes it, Rex Harrison moves with a pleasant case and an apparent concentration on his goal of correcting Eliza's speech and ways all of which gives power to the Shavian answer when Eliza claims he's rude: "Have you ever seen me not rude...
...Costumes by Cecil Beaton...
...This is, however, one of the very few instances where the lead Shaw proffers is not followed to gay advantage...
...Among the many choice moments are those in which Higgins, blinder than love in his masculine complacency, wonders why a woman can't he like a man...
...sometimes simple, as when Eliza, worn out with words, cries angrily to her suitor, "Show me...
...complains the professor-himself on a halfway level between speech and song...
...sung by that outstanding member of the undeserving poor...
...and Cecil Beaton has clothed the cockney crowd and the aristocratic set in costumes amusing or charming...
...He has made Eliza a fair lady: she has to make him a feelingful gentleman...
...And there might have been a dream ballet when Eliza, after her first rise from cockney, sings "I could have danced all night...
...Eliza's father Alfred P. Doolittle...
...Why can't the English learn to speak...
...Stanley Hollo-way is the most obviously acting of the company: but his strut, though artificial, is entertaining...
...Sometimes the language wholly disappears...
...The transformers of Shaw's Pygmalion have gone the whole hog and given us in My Fair Lady some fine musical fare...
...Poor Eliza's efforts at pronunciation are so arduous that when, three headaches later, at 3 a.m., she finally manages: "The rine in Spine The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain," the audience bursts into applause...
...As "my fair lady," Julie Andrews makes the cockney flower-girl real and warming, and also the transformation...
...At the Hellinger Theater...
...Alan Jay Lerner has added lyrics that deftly develop the Shavian theme...
...Oliver Smith has made swift-changing sets, equally effective in the London slums and at the Embassy Ball...
...They are sometimes tricky, as when Higgins avers he's "never known a ruder pest" than the fellow from Budapest...
...Designed by Oliver Smith...
...With the voice and manners of a lady, she triumphs there only for Higgins to discover that he is henceforth bounded by a refined and quickened soul...
...as the fuddled colonial colonel who makes the wager...
...Pygmalion, produced in 1913, has waited longer but is now rewarded with a prize indeed...
...London Bridge remains standing, but London pride must learn to fall...
...Henry Higgins, professor of speech, wagers that he can so transform the cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle that she will pass as a duchess at the Embassy Ball...
...The solid story is Shaw's...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 14
