Word: pygmalion
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...have before us Pygmalion's Galatea or Frankenstein's monster...
...FAIR LADY: Playwright George Bernard Shaw's clearheaded comedy Pygmalion (1913) ends with Eliza Doolittle leaving her mentor Henry Higgins to pursue a life of her own. To stymie efforts to tag on a happy ending, Shaw went so far as to write an afterword in which he married off Eliza to the foppish Freddy Hill. But Shaw's efforts were in vain: the wildly popular musical version, staged in 1956, six years after his death, ends with the unmistakably romantic reconciliation that audiences had secretly been hoping for for half a century...
...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...