Shaw's fair lady
A century ago, George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion, most famous today as the source of the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady. To mark the centennial of the play's completion, San Diego's Old Globe has mounted a handsome production on its main stage, starring Robert Sean Leonard, Charlotte Parry, and Paxton Whitehead.
Director Nicholas Martin benefits from the casting of four Old Globe Associate Artists – Kandis Chappell, Deborah Taylor, Don Sparks and Whitehead – and bringing on a fifth, Robert Morgan, as costume designer. He also inspires a significant contribution from lead designer Alexander Dodge, whose set design presents the three play's distinct locations through two, center-and-ring turntables.
The mechanical scene changes, which include rotating wall alcoves that help distinguish Henry's library from his mother's salon, add to the briskness of Martin's staging. So do the judicious text edits, which help bring the production in at two hours. Even with Martin's addition of a questionable wordless coda, which shows the wedding of Eliza and Freddy, it's a relatively brief encounter with the long-winded Mr. Shaw.
Shaw writes in his postscript to Pygmalion that Eliza's marriage to Freddy was inevitable for the transformed flower girl. What it adds is confusion over how Eliza and Higgins have been affected by the events that transpired. As she looks over her shoulder at Higgins, from the nuptuals conducted upstage, he is slouched in his chair, seemingly unaffected. To this she seems mildly perturbed.
And so, dramatically, the fine staging ends with a whimper rather than a bang. However, the ideas within Shaw's battle of the sexes, the classes, the dialects, remains engrossing. Higgins (Leonard) is on a regular listening-prowl, jotting down notes about the various identifying accents of his neighbors when his attention is drawn by a young flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (Parry). She reacts to his eavesdropping, but a Col. Pickering (Whitehead), just arrived to meet Higgins, introduces himself to the professor as a fellow student of linguistics. Higgins explains his interest in the power of speech to change lives, and insists Pickering stay with him to discuss their work.
The next day, Higgins' housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce (Taylor), ushers Eliza, who wants language lessons so she might raise herself from curbside flower seller to flower shop owner. Higgins wagers Pickering that an intense tutorial, in which Eliza stays there, will allow her to pass as royalty. While Eliza is shown her room, her father (Don Sparks) arrives to shake down the professor for his guardian's fee.
The lessons commence until she is ready for a trial run before Higgins' mother (Chappell) and several of the Eynsford Hills: Freddy (Robbie Simpson), his mother (Maggie Carney), and his sister Clara (Danielle O'Farrell). Mrs. Higgins is first to raise the question of what will become of Eliza once she is transformed in speech, but not in bearing.
The night of the ultimate test, a social event of international standing, occurs offstage, and we learn as Eliza, Higgins and Pickering arrive home afterwards that it has been a triumpph. But the men's treatment of her, as if she were little more than a prize-winner at a county fair, opens her eyes. Higgins recoils at her charges, reminding her that he has transformed her, and charged her nothing. "I sold flowers," she fires back. "I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else!"
It is another of the many "talking points" enmeshed in Shaw's work. The distinction with how what speaks and what one says is an underlying subtext of the play. That Eliza is missing the educated, classist way of speaking, while Higgins is missing the humanist ability to empathize, is another. What we would like to see, and what we get in the beloved musical, which Shaw loved, too, is a song of affection by Higgins. That is missing in the play, and it certainly strays from the original myth of Pygmalion, who asked the Gods to allow him to turn a statue, Gallatea, into a real woman. Higgins' only love is for his work, perhaps for himself. In essence he may be closer to Shaw than Pygmalion.
Leonard offers a decidedly American Higgins. It is a good choice, and one that makes the phonetics professor feel familiar to our audiences. Easy in bearing, not the stiff upper class snob one might assume from his breeding, he can be understood as preoccupied with his scholarship. As Shaw writes in his postscript, Higgins is quite content to have his mother's care as the feminine presence in his life. His work is his passion, and he is without interest in sex.
Parry is a stellar actress, and this performance is solid, if undistinguished. Not her fault. Some of the cuts may have limited her moments to be more than moulding clay. Others are allowed more variety and stand out more. The most noticeable is Sparks (inset photo, who gives Alfred Doolittle the right mix of pride and poverty. Content with his station, he also is thrust into society by another chain of events. Chappell and Taylor are also delightful, but to see Paxton Whitehead performing Shaw is a historic delight. In a play about speech, his every utterance is a confirmation of its power.