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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Pygmalion — Do I Hear a Waltz?
By Harry Haun
19 Oct 2007
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Claire Danes in Pygmalion.
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| photo by Joan Marcus | Playbill.com mingles with the first-nighters of the Roundabout Theatre Company's new Broadway production of the Shaw classic, Pygmalion.
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Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's tract about attaining social mobility through proper elocution, landed at the American Airlines Theatre Oct. 18, 2007 — its sixth appearance on Broadway since its arrival here Oct. 12, 1914. You thought more, right? That's because running along side the play, in our mind and DNA, is classic Lerner and Loewe.
The rich-witted speechifying of the play falls on the ears of a modern audience like musical lead-ins. When Alan Jay Lerner first suggested making My Fair Lady out of Pygmalion, The Bearded Wonder shot off a terse no-thanks: "I think my words make their own music," Shaw shared.
Roundabout Theatre Company is now putting that edict to the acid test with a production
that returns to the original text and intent — a play without music per se and minus the happy ending the world is waiting for. Shaw steadfastly resisted any whiff of romance between his phonetics expert, Henry Higgins, and Eliza Doolittle, the guttersnipe flower-peddler he transforms through rigorous diction exercises into the illusion of a refined, fair lady.
Since the play's debut, Shaw had shouted down the idea of a romantic resolve (with Eliza returning to Higgins), yet that ending was sprung on him in 1938 at a preview the night before Pygmalion opened as a movie with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Shaw did write the screenplay and won an Oscar ("This is an insult," he said). He didn't write that ending, however. He insisted only his words be used, so the enterprising producer used the "slippers" line from earlier in the play. The remark was later borrowed to be the climax of My Fair Lady, as well.
Director David Grindley, who helmed last season's rightly acclaimed and ridiculously underattended Journey's End, re-enforces the anti-romantic ending. Most productions end with Higgins' scoffing laugh that Eliza is altar-bound with the high-born but otherwise worthless Freddy Eynsford Hill ("Marry Freddy!" is the professor's exclamation), but Grindley goes back to the 1912 text and has Higgins staring forlornly at the audience after Eliza's dry-eyed and emphatic exit.
"'Marry Freddy!' was a revision that came when, after the original production, Shaw was
trying to ensure that the audience knew it wasn't a romance," Grindley proffered. "That
line was written for later productions. We're doing the original text. What I tried to do is
really mine the text for everything that it could possibly offer. Higgins is described as just being in his 40s. He is also described as being a child a lot. He is so caught up in his work and objectifying people that he is unaware of the emotional consequences that he has on others — and he discovers his emotions in the course of the play, particularly at the end where he realizes that he really feels for Eliza — not necessarily in a romantic way. She's built into his house. He wants her to remain, but, by that stage, she's decided she is going
to lead her own life in her own way and she's off on her own. The ending is very
ambivalent. He doesn't know where he stands."
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Boyd Gaines and Jefferson Mays in Pygmalion
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Proving there's life after Journey's End, Grindley recruited some of the worthies who filled his World War I trenches. For Higgins, he promoted the cook for the doomed regiment, Jefferson Mays. Its senior officer, a Tony-nominated Boyd Gaines, was assigned the sidekick role, Colonel Hugh
Pickering. And Kieran Campion, the captured German soldier, is callow Freddy. (There was reportedly almost a fourth recruit — John Curless, as blustery a Doolittle as there is — but he was unavailable.)
The design team is identical — Jonathan Fensom (sets and costumes), Jason Taylor (lighting — some might say underlighting) and Gregory Clarke (sound) — painting this production, if not on the dark side, at least worlds removed from Cecil Beaton. The curtain rises on what appears to be a dreary Covent Garden Theatre, pelted by rain. A dark and stormy night, I'm sorry, is the only way to describe it.
"I was very fortunate that so many people around me during that experience wanted to
make Pygmalion work," Grindley said, "and it's great that they all came aboard."
At the show's afterparty, held at the Marriott Marquis, Mays pleaded guilty to an eclectic
career. "I'm afraid so," he admitted. "People just don't know what to do with me. It's
endlessly vexing to my agent." But it keeps him deliriously free from being typecast. His
first Broadway appearance after winning the Tony as the persecuted transvestite in I Am
My Own Wife was the gourmet-wannabe cook in the trenches of Journey's End, and the gag
going round at the time was: "They got him out of the dress but not out of the kitchen." In
between he did Victor Moore's meek veep role in an Encores! version of Of Thee I Sing.
Gaines, sporting a Colonel Schweppes beard as elegant as his King's English, was
doubtlessly cast for kindness as Colonel Pickering — a commodity that particularly comes to the fore in close proximity to Higgins, who obviously has never been near a charm school. "We had a terrific time," he said of the close-knit interplay he has with Mays.
Punctuating these two British outings was a much-too-short stint as Patti LuPone's buffer/foil in Gypsy at City Center. Yes, Gaines is up to doing that again — "if they ask me, if it happens. The last rumor I heard is that Gypsy will happen again — here first, then maybe
London."
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Jefferson Mays in Pygmalion.
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Eliza's jubilantly ne'er-do-well dad, Alfred P. Doolittle — the dustman with unexpected
moral depth (at least from Shaw's perverse perspective) — is the latest in an unbroken line of buffoons that has occupied Jay O. Sanders since he surrendered the sagebrush Falstaff he played so lustily Off-Broadway in Lone Star Love to a brand-name Texan for a run at
Broadway. The project crumbled from too much temperamental star-power during its
Seattle tryout, but you'll hear no horselaugh from Sanders. "Those are very good friends
of mine, and I felt very badly that it took such a bad turn," he said sadly. "And I never met
him, but I'm told Randy Quaid is a terrific guy. Whatever the chemistry was that got all
messed up, I just felt badly for everybody. I missed doing the show, and I would have
loved to have done it, but I stepped away when they said they needed a name to attract
more money to get it on. I said, 'If that's what you have to do, you have my blessing.' I
just wanted them to get the show on." Continued...
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