Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

MFL

Took Leonie and Shirley to My Fair Lady.  Rose thought it not as good a production as the one she saw in 1959, but I put that down to nostalgia.

Still, questions arise on rewatching.

One is how well it all fits if you take "confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so" as meaning what it would today, which is gay.    Higgins picking up Pickering at the opera, and then on from there.  You could play it like that.

Another  is that it was surely slightly odd for a socialist like Shaw to suggest that it wasn't capitalism that was keeping people down, just regional accents.                  

Recurring, where exactly was Professor Higgins a professor?  and of what?  Sweet, who was the model, was a professor of phonetics at Oxford, but late in his career - and Higgins is unquestionably a Londoner. In any case, it seems to pay extremely well; though some money must come from his mother, who also lives extremely well (though in a Cecil Beaton house, rather than, as Shaw wrote, a Morris print arts-and-crafts house).

Today, too, there would be the vestige of a suggestion of child abuse between Liza and her dad.  You could play that at different levels.

Other than that, a reminder of how many classic songs you can cram into one musical.


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