Word: pygmalions
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During an otherwise sedate tea party in the second act of Pygmalion, Peter O'Toole rises from a chair, stumbles into a fireplace screen with a jangling crash, whirls around to recover his balance, ensnares and dances with a grandfather clock, then ends by flinging himself into another chair and reclining silkily with a look of nothing having happened. The bare stage direction exists in George Bernard Shaw's text, but the moment -- and the + character judgment it reflects -- is in large part O'Toole's contribution to his literally smashing, if belated, Broadway debut at age 54, after nearly...
...chief romance in Pygmalion is between O'Toole and his audience. O'Toole ! often pauses in three-quarter profile, displaying the blond mane that has edged imperceptibly toward silver, the classical beauty that seems enhanced rather than marred by a slightly lopsided jawline. His Higgins is a star turn in almost 19th century fashion -- at once shrewdly alert Shavianism and a brilliantly calibrated indulgence in boyish adorability...
Peter O' Toole makes a smashing Broadway debut in a showy, shrewdly judged Pygmalion. -- All My Sons is Arthur Miller at his best...
...occasionally the satire sinks to the level of characters shouting at the audience, "See! This is a symbol! It's supposed to mean something!" The audience survives only because Durang finds a way once again to insert more mini-parodies, one of which, a version of Pygmalion as directed by Robert Wilson, finally reaches the level of invention we had hoped for all night. But it will be lost on anyone who hasn't seen any of the Wilson pieces at the A.R.T., and who doesn't realize that the actors slowly pacing across the stage mouthing phonemes once...
...sculpture because of its greater power of illusion and fantasy. (Sculpture is resistant stuff, hard to fantasize about. Renoir used to provoke erotic reveries; Maillol, never. You can imagine a painted body as flesh, but a sculpted one remains stone -- hence the archetypal frustration expressed in the myth of Pygmalion.) Combine the relative unpopularity of modern sculpture with its awesome complexity as a subject and one sees the problem of this show. There has not, in fact, been such a survey in France, or even in the U.S., in living memory...