Hey, it's the next installment of our play-by-play coverage of the eleven-day trip that I took recently with my fabulous friend Amber to Las Vegas, Philadelphia and New York. Before you read about Day 8, you really oughta read the chapters on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, my Philadelphia Addenda and Day 7.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Let me warn you at the top: This is a real long post. I mean real long.
Dick Cavett once said that when he first moved to New York, he realized an amazing thing about it. You could go to bed there and in the morning when you woke up, you'd think, "Hey, if I walk outside, I'll be in New York!" I still sometimes feel that way when I'm in the city.
On those visits, Breakfast always seems elusive and gets supplanted by Early Lunch. Amber and I met my pals Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin at Sardi's, where Jim's prominence as a theatrical performer is noted with a caricature on the wall. Jim and Steve are a splendid union of two very talented people who seem to know absolutely everyone in their profession, their profession being The Theatre.
The great thing about knowing performers is that I usually don't have to tell you about them. I can show them to you by embedding a YouTube video. Here's nine minutes of Jim and Steve singing about their relationship…
I knew Jim before he met Steve and now cannot imagine him without his longtime partner. The four of us sat and dined and talked and talked and talked and had a very good time.
Because lunch ran so late. I wasn't all that hungry as it neared time to head uptown for our evening's entertainment. Neither was Amber so we decided to each get a slice of pizza to tide us over until after the show. We went to Joe's Pizza on Broadway in Times Square, which many will tell you sells the best individual slices in town. She had pepperoni and I had plain cheese and they were pretty good. Then we took the subway to Lincoln Center and got there with enough time to spare that Amber asked, "Is there somewhere around here where we could get two more slices?"
I had Yelp! show me what was nearby and most of the pizza spots seemed like places where it's a whole pie or nothing. But a restaurant called Francesco Pizzeria on Columbus Avenue was described as a "slice joint" and I thought I recalled it getting a good review from Dave Portnoy, who does those YouTube pizza reviews that I occasionally post.
I was right. He gave it an 8.1 out of 10 and I trust Dave. Unfortunately, his guest reviewer was Dr. Oz who gave it an 8 and I wouldn't trust Dr. Oz to tell me where to buy aspirin. The slices we got there were good — Amber liked hers more than the one she had at Joe's but we got pie that was a lot greasier than what Dave and the alleged Doctor sampled. Mine required two napkins' worth of blotting.
Full of cheese 'n' dough, we strode back to Lincoln Center to see the new revival of My Fair Lady. Dividing line, please…
I was really looking forward to this. The national touring company of the original production of My Fair Lady was the first real Broadway-type show I ever saw. I had the songs memorized by age ten…but that was the last time I saw it performed on stage. It is not a cheap show to do, requiring as it does a very big cast and very lavish sets and costumes. Most local groups simply cannot afford to do it, or at least to do it right.
[CORRECTION ADDED YEARS LATER: I read what I wrote again and realized I'd seen it performed on stage in the eighties. Rex Harrison was doing a "farewell tour" in it so everyone could say they saw him in it…and cringe a bit when he forgot lyrics.]
I enjoyed 97% of this new production tremendously. The costumes and sets were superb. The cast was excellent. Harry Hadden-Paton is good enough as Higgins to make you forget Rex Harrison. Lauren Ambrose is good enough as Eliza Doolittle to make you forget either Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn, depending on which Eliza you have embedded in your brain. The orchestra does full justice to the score.
And it has Diana Rigg as Higgins' mother. I am just the right age to have loved her as Mrs. Peel on The Avengers — the *real* Avengers, not those usurpers of the name led by Captain America. Mrs. Higgins has never been a large part and Ms. Rigg probably learned all her lines in about twenty minutes. But she also scored with every damned one of them and the applause at her entrance made me quite happy.
The show also has Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza's father, the role Stanley Holloway played on the stage and on the screen. Alfred P. Doolittle has two show-stopping numbers — "A Little Bit of Luck" and "Get Me To The Church on Time." The first was fairly routine this time out…charming but nothing spectacular. The "Church" number, though…oh, my goodness. The "Church" number.
This is kind of interesting. The original Broadway version of My Fair Lady in 1956 had no trouble securing a top director, a top production designer, a top costume designer, etc. But it took a while to find a choreographer. Several of the best ones turned it down because it wasn't a real dance show. It was mostly ballroom-style and a little of the English Music Hall style dancing in which Stanley Holloway excelled. There was no number where a choreographer could show off or be particularly innovative.
There is now. I suppose some would quibble that what they did with "Get Me To The Church" is out of character with the show itself, adding in acrobatics and rotating sets and drag queens (yes, drag queens) and extra, extra choruses. They might be right on some level but boy, was that number spectacular. Norbert Leo Butz is an actor first and a dancer second so he doesn't turn into a Fred Astaire wanna-be when he dances. He dances in character and at the end of the song, the place exploded. It was maybe the most exciting dance number I ever saw on a stage and Amber and I were on our feet along with the general consensus.
Everyone in the show is so perfect that you're probably wondering when I'm going to get to the 3% I didn't love. That's now but first I need to insert one of these…
Remember: You've been warned.
They changed the ending. At the end of Pygmalion, the George Bernard Shaw play on which My Fair Lady was based, Eliza and Higgins do not fall in love. She leaves him, though not as an act of defiance or anger. She leaves for a reason that has been valid for any woman at any time in our history: She simply has not gotten any affection from the man.
Shaw wrote the play for a prominent actress of the day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who as her name would suggest was not a woman of great independence. She did however have a keen sense of what pleased audiences and she decided it would please audiences if Eliza and Higgins wound up together. That was how the first English-language stage performances of Pygmalion went, much to Shaw's surprise.
He does not seem to have stopped this, though he did pen a note that was added to the published version of the play that said that Eliza wound up marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill (the silly fop who in M.F.L. sings "On The Street Where You Live") and they moved in with Higgins for a time before she opened her own flower shop, a possibility mentioned earlier in the play. Higgins remained a mentor to her and also the "confirmed old bachelor" that he said he was.
Shaw also suggested that Eliza stayed interested in Higgins and had some fantasies about dragging him "off his pedestal" and seeing him "making love like any common man." He also wrote that while her instinct told her not to marry Higgins, it also told her not to give him up and that he would remain "one of the strongest personal interests in her life."
Pygmalion was performed then with many variant endings, some honoring Shaw's views, some not. Shavian scholars have debated for years just what is the proper ending and indeed, the published text of the play was changed at least once during Shaw's lifetime. The 1938 British film starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller had an ambiguous ending, also not approved (but not stopped) by Shaw. Eliza flees Higgins' home to be with Freddy but then returns to Higgins and it is suggested she cannot or will not leave him.
The screenplay, probably more so than Shaw's original play, was the basis for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady and it ends of course with Higgins realizing he has grown "accustomed to her face," getting off that pedestal as much as any "confirmed old bachelor" can…and Eliza deciding her future is with him. In the new version, she returns to him and it does seem to be leading up to them being a couple, as every audience member who knows My Fair Lady from any venue expects.
But then she runs away from him. In fact, she runs off the set and up an aisle of the audience, the suggestion being that she is running as far from him as is humanly possible. The End.
Advance word on this revival suggested that the traditional ending had to go because it did not match with current attitudes about women and Me Too and such. If you didn't know that was a concern, it's announced clearly when in one scene — and remember this show is set a long time ago in Edwardian London — a completely gratuitous band of women march through a public square with signs demanding the vote for women, which is of course never again mentioned in the show.
There is a separate argument as to whether plays set well in the past should reflect society then or now. Assuming we decide a play should not contain sensibilities we have outgrown, I would argue that the change in My Fair Lady is still wrong and unnecessary. My friend Shelly Goldstein wrote on her Facebook page this morning…
OK, let's really take a deep breath here. My Fair Lady is not sexist. Henry Higgins is supercilious & chauvinistic but he's no worse to Liza than he is to anyone else. The show isn't a romance and it isn't about sexism. It's about language, class and the choices one makes to rise above the station some would insist is your only option.
Professor Higgins in any version of this musical is about as far from a Harvey Weinstein as you could get and still be an asshole. He insists that Eliza be properly chaperoned when living in his home, doesn't show the slightest interest in wanting to touch her and is outraged at the suggestion of her father who is more than willing to pimp her out for money. There are those who have even argued that Higgins and Pickering are "confirmed old bachelors" because they're both gay. That's how total Higgins' disinterest is in molesting his fair lady but there's nothing in the text to indicate that either.
He treats her like a lower class person only because she talks like one and he argues that that alone is the reason she is but one half-notch above a beggar woman. He is anti-female only in the sense that he personally does not want one in his life, which even the most avowed advocate of women's equality would concede is his right. His song, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?" is a parody of how foolish some men — most notably, a man who's never really had a woman in his life — can be about the opposite gender…and also about their own.
He makes a deal to pay her for participating in his little wager that he can pass her off as duchess by giving her the elocution lessons which she came to him to get. He could have made the exact same bet to pass her father or any lower-caste male off as a duke.
Her learning to talk like a proper lady was her idea, remember. He keeps his part of their bargain in every way. And in the traditional text of My Fair Lady, the climax is that this arrogant, I-don't-need-anyone person comes to realize that he needs her…and while she could leave him at that point — and has once — she chooses not to. Even in the year 2018, what is wrong with that story?
What to me is particularly amiss with the changed ending is that it just plain doesn't fit. I doubt you can take any decent play ever written, invert the last 10-15 seconds and have it apply. Imagine if in the closing moments of The Music Man, Harold Hill skips town with all the money he collected for band instruments, laughing at what suckers they are in River City. Or if you have a production of Death of a Salesman and every word is the same until the last second, as his funeral is letting out, Willy Loman turns up alive. If you want your My Fair Lady to end as this revival does, you should probably drop "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" and everything else that starts to humanize Higgins in the end.
You should also explain why she comes back to his home at all. The way it plays, she comes back because (I guess) she still has some feelings about him and needs to explore them…or something. But then he is nicer to her than he has ever been before and she responds by, without a word of explanation, sprinting into the audience and (I guess) out of his life.
So what happens next? She left him once and came back. Does she come back again? We don't know. People defending this ending are arguing it's merely restoring Shaw's ending…but Shaw didn't have Higgins expressing anything like the change of emotions he does near the end of My Fair Lady. Shaw's Higgins never changes one bit.
Does she wed Freddy? Shaw said she did but we get no indication that that happens either and even if it did, that's not an empowering act for a woman…marrying a man for whom she has not shown the slightest ounce of affection. And oh, yes — to have a place to live, they'll have to go persuade Higgins (the guy she ran away from like he was Dracula) to take them in.
Does she make something of herself? Does she open that florist shop that Higgins and Pickering were going to help fund? That would sure be a better life for her than remaining a prisoner of the gutters, condemned by every syllable she utters. As is, we don't know she doesn't wind up back there.
This version of the play doesn't say what becomes of her. It just kind of stops…and the audience we saw it with let out a big, unheard collective "huh?" It surprised them but not, it seemed to me, in a good way. Eliza running for dear life away from the man who taught her how to speak like royalty was not what the book Alan Jay Lerner wrote led up to.
We cheered the show of course because everything before that was so splendid. The performers certainly deserved the standing ovations they received…and if they'd trotted out the designers and choreographer and arrangers, we'd have cheered for them, too. I absolutely recommend you see this show if you can…and considering how hard it was for me to get tickets, I suspect it'll be there for a long time.
If you do see it, please write and explain to me how the ending fits that play or even any concept of how women should be treated today. I'm not even sure My Fair Lady should be about how women should be treated today but if it has to be, that wasn't it.