Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...introduction to George Bernard Shaw was in 10th grade, when we read Pygmalion in English class. After studying the play, we were treated to a student matinee performance at the roundabout Theatre in New York city. When Higgins exploded with "Liza, you impudent slut!" a good friend of mine with overlarge eyeballs and a frightening smile cackled madly with a demonic guffaw...
...theater company was not amused. After the performance, the actors lectured my class on the appropriate decorum of a theater audience. Clearly they had mistaken Pygmalion for some other, much more serious, play, No Exit perhaps...
...lions; in The Entertainer he gave Laurence Olivier his meatiest modern role as a decayed vaudevillian. But with Look Back in Anger, the 26-year-old actor-author, who never went to university and who, only a year before, was playing callow Freddy Eynsford Hill in a road-company Pygmalion, forever changed the face of theater...
...Pygmalion success story who parades into the Kittredges' home and fools them all, rapper/sitcom star Will Smith performs admirably. His portrayal is honest and sincere and it is easy to see how even New York's snobby elite could be taken in by his easy style and charm. Smith may be a little too gentle and clean-cut, however, to be thoroughly convincing as the conniving and street-smart criminal who trades sexual favors for the training and personal information which enables him to con the Kittredges...
...schizoid staging reflects director Howard Davies' determination to do something new vs. the insistence of the estate of librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on replicating the 1956 staging. Most impiously, Davies hints that Eliza leaves Higgins forever, as in Shaw's Pygmalion. That idea fights the musical's text and, indeed, its boy-meets-girl form. The text and form win the brawl. But nothing in this show is close to a knockout...