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Published on 7/23/08
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Most people have a pretty clear mental image of Professor Henry Higgins, who makes a lady out of a discursively challenged Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. Higgins is a gruff but lovable chap unable to resist Eliza’s charms, which cause the wry curmudgeon to break out in song. Of course, this impression of the characters created by George Bernard Shaw is the sentimentalized one from My Fair Lady, and it’s safe to assume that Shaw would have been disgusted by what Lerner and Loewe made of Pygmalion, his sharp, linguocultural satire from 1914.
We might conversely surmise that Shaw would be tickled by Jefferson Mays in the role. Mays clearly read and took to heart the playwright’s description of Higgins as “the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject...a very impetuous baby ‘taking notice’ eagerly and loudly.” Sure enough, Mays delivers a performance that eschews soft cuteness in place of intellectual rigor; he dares to be coldly detached, sour, even childishly willful. Some will be put off by the approach, but I found it stimulating and even poignant: In the final seconds of the play, remorse flickers over Higgins’s face after he has been left—and superseded—by his “creation” (Danes).
The rest of director David Grindley’s intensely focused, lucid production is mixed. Danes, making a decent stage debut, has grace and presence, and handles both her gutter English and proper speech fairly fluidly. As Higgins’s better half, Colonel Pickering, Boyd Gaines is robustly humane, while Jay O’Sanders’s philosophical reprobate Alfred Doolittle paints in overly broad strokes. Caveats aside, Pygmalion is a divine revival glittering with wit, style and fierce intelligence, unabashedly not a romance but a tough lesson in friendship and the mechanics of social advancement. By GBS, I think they’ve got it.
