Word: pygmalions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first thing any Shavian will probably tell you about Pygmalion is not to think of it as the non-musical version of My Fair Lady. That's the alias by which it's most commonly recognized, which is not at all to its discredit: few more delightful musicals have ever been written. But what the romantic aura of the Broadway adaptation obscures, and what the new Lyric Stage production generally succeeds in conveying, is the darker, harder-edged quality that persists beneath all the sparkle...
...Pygmalion is on one level a lightly speculative exercise on social mobility and the potential of human education-the idea that even a flower girl can be transformed into a lady by learning to speak and dress like one. And on this level, the play is a joy to watch, grounding the fairy tale quality of the story with gloriously Shavian wit. But as a drama of human relations, it's much more frustrating and far less palatable than many of the playwright's other works (the fourth act, when done with enough punch, is one of the most brutally...
Chandra is a kind of Pygmalion: he can turn whatever piece of stone or gold he touches into a lifelike creation. Born into a family that had been master artisans for four generations, he quickly established himself as one of Jaipur's finest sculptors, and his talents were sought by temple priests and princes. "If all I saw was your nose, it would be enough for me to sculpt a likeness of your entire body," says Chandra, 75, whose folded hands are like a box of old wooden tools. "It's all to do with proportions. That...
...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...