Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Before the war, Smith taught at Columbia and Brown, also starred on a radio show called Where Are You From (TIME, May 6, 1940). Like Shaw's Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, Linguistic Scientist Smith told strangers in his audience where they hailed from by the way they talked. His batting average: a respectable 80%. He made them pronounce such shibboleths as Mary, marry, merry (people from west of the Appalachians make no distinction), and wash, water, Washington. Smith's most notable failure: his wartime insistence that Lord Haw-Haw could not be William Joyce (he was). Smith thought...
...more and less than a great actress. She is less in that she has yet to play the sort of sustained dramatic part that characterizes the work of a Katherine Cornell or a Judith Anderson. She is less, because whenever she undertakes non-musical roles such as Liza in "Pygmalion," her own virtuosity substitutes for the content of the play at various points throughout her performance...
...oratorio-like Le Roi David he perfected his own trick of plaiting two huge, serpentine strands of melody into a dissonant, sometimes arid, fabric of harmony. He went on to write some 60 works, including four symphonies, also twenty-odd French and English movie scores (Mayerling, Pygmalion), a medium which he prefers to opera...
...test would be truer, of course, if the veterans had chosen "Pygmalion' or some other Shavian comedy. But the only available local theater is Sanders, which once frightened Charles Addams, and no comedy could hope to overcome its intense and ancient gloom. Its other limitations, such as the absence of a curtain and the lack of opportunity for an imaginative set designer to cut loose, have also contributed to the selection of the plays, none of which requires more than a suggestive skeleton of scenery...
...Little Acre became the first U.S. Penguin to sell a million copies. But Penguin, along with a smattering of mysteries, has consistently put out first-rate titles (e.g., Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence; Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine; Shaw's Pygmalion, Saint Joan and Major Barbara), and neither of Penguin's rivals has ever tried to make a quick quarter sale of Greek or Roman masterpieces...