Word: pygmalions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Reagan High's coolest coeds dies swallowing a candy jawbreaker. To cover up this gaffe, bitch-on-heels Courtney (Rose McGowan, below, right) tries turning a geekette who knows about the death (Judy Evans Greer) into a fox goddess. A teen twist on the old Frankenstein-Pygmalion plot is as familiar as last week, when it was called She's All That. (And a decade ago, it was the evil-teen classic Heathers.) Writer-director Stein flirts with black humor but, alas, never goes all the way. As for McGowan, she has the buxom wantoness and smartly cruel mouth...
...Farrow, they had the advantage of being actresses. Soon-Yi, on the other hand, may be traveling down the bumpy road taken by Tom Arnold. "He likes to mentor young people," Phil Leshin, who says he is a friend of Allen's, told the Post. "It's Pygmalion all over again...
DIED. TAMARA GEVA, 91, witty Russian ballerina-actress; in New York City. Geva, just shy of 16, married the choreographer George Balanchine, becoming, as her autobiography Split Seconds put it, "the first Galatea to his Pygmalion." She set aside dancing in the '30s to act and later starred in George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance...
...rest of the cast, free of the tensions and ambivalence of the two principal characters, do an excellent job presenting the purely comic elements with which Pygmalion abounds. Michael Bradshaw is first-class as that eloquent spokesman for "the undeserving poor," Alfred Doolittle; Eve Johnson cuts a superbly commanding matriarchal figure as the noble Mrs. Higgins; while Alice Duffy strides with majestic aplomb as Mrs. Pearce, Higgins' unflappable housekeeper...
Despite the folly of comparing Pygmalion with its musical offspring, one can't help but recall, a little wistfully, the incomparable inflections of the great Rex Harrison and the riotously funny phonetics lessons (which Shaw either wrote in later or should have written). Nonetheless, the Lyric Stage production does succeed in capturing both the delicious comic shimmer and the essentially problematic nature of Shaw's best-known play...