Word: pygmalion
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Looked at analytically, Me and My Girl should not be so infectiously exhilarating. The lyrics are banal and devoid of wit; the songs, though hummable and winsome, tend to have the same simple beat; and the narrative -- a reworking of Pygmalion in which a cheerily crooked Cockney finds himself heir to an earldom and a fortune if he can learn to behave like a swell -- is comic but farfetched. Yet the gaudy $4 million production has an unabashed desire to please, touches of sprightly invention (a mounted suit of armor abruptly walks offstage; ancestor portraits come alive and tap-dance...
Here is the hectoring muse of the theater, certain of every wink and diphthong. For Pygmalion, a road company Liza Doolittle is counseled on Cockney sounds: "Liar is lawyer . . . Handkerchief is Enkecher . . . Brute is not broot: it is brer-ewt. The utterance is slovenly and nasal, colds in the head being almost chronic in the gutter...
...things he cooked up himself (such as the innocent fiction that he had been to Mexico in the army of Napoleon III and had seen real jungles) or that were invented by friends (like the playwright Alfred Jarry's absurd story that he, like Pygmalion, taught the old boy to paint). And it would finish with the belief that Rousseau (1844-1910) was one of the greatest protomodern artists...
...RAMEAU: PYGMALION (Erato). Conductor Nicholas McGegan's graceful performance of the gentle opera-ballet...
...home and a new surname. "We would go to the top of a mountain, and I would teach him to recite Shakespeare to me without shouting. He wanted to speak standard English, without the Welsh accent, and I had him read the part of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion." Young Burton probably had more in common, however, with Alfred Doolittle, the free-living dustman in the play, who, as Higgins said, had "a certain natural gift of rhetoric." That gift took Burton to Oxford during World War II, and in 1948, after a mandatory stint in the Royal Air Force...