Word: eliza
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...sometimes nerve-racking to read what these boxes can do. Joseph Weizenbaum, of M.I.T., who has recently come to criticize computer education for children as a context for "toy problems," nonetheless got more than a toy gasp out of the public in 1968 when he unveiled his project ELIZA-an IBM 7094 programmed by Weizenbaum to "practice" psychotherapy-and then published a "conversation" between ELIZA and a real patient...
...ELIZA: What resemblance...
...clinch, but the possibility, which gave the story much of its electricity, was always there. That charge is what is lacking from the new production. Harrison's Higgins is urbane and amusing, a rare companion despite himself, but he is not a possible mate for Eliza Doolittle, who could well be his granddaughter. Indeed, he is lucky that he could find an actress old enough to play his own mother-the inimitable Cathleen Nesbitt, who was also in the original cast and who at 92 is still pouring the tea in her box at Ascot...
There are other problems with this Fair Lady. Eliza is played by Nancy Ringham, the American understudy who was suddenly called in when Cheryl Kennedy, an English actress, was forced out by illness. Ringham has both a pretty face and an attractive voice, but she does not make a good Cockney, or make a very convincing climb up the slippery slopes of the English language. More important, she does not have anything like the fire, the almost feral drive of a good Eliza. Not only was Higgins a great teacher; Eliza was also a great pupil. That "squashed cabbage leaf...
...this production is not as memorable as the original, however, it is still, by the standards of most musicals, very good indeed. Nicholas Wyman is a delightfully silly Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the bumbling aristocrat who falls in love with Eliza at Ascot and thereafter spends most of his time burbling love songs on the street where she lives. Milo O'Shea, who plays her father, Alfred P. Doolittle, is a fine and feisty rogue, and Jack Gwillim manages to be both good-hearted and hopelessly stuffy, just as Colonel Pickering, that confirmed old bachelor, should be. Cecil Beaton...