Last night I finally caught up with Gingold Theatrical Group's production of Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This new staging by director David Staller imagines a pantheon of gods looking down on Henry Higgins as they bring his "creation" to life.
Mark Evans plays Higgins, the socially awkward expert in phonetics who finds a flower girl and bets he can pass her off as a duchess. That flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, is performed by television star Synnøve Karlsen, who shows Liza's evolution from calling out "Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!" to articulating some of the finest language Shaw ever wrote.
The rest of the cast play white-clad gods who relate the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told by Ovid, and then perform all of the other roles. Just as the mythical Pygmalion carved a statue and prayed to the gods to bring her to life, Higgins teaches Eliza correct speech but worries that there's something missing. He takes her to an "at home" day of his mother (played brilliantly by Lizan Mitchell) in hopes that he can find that intangible quality she's missing.
This scene was the highlight of the show for me. Karlsen manages to get so many of the manners of respectable society right while at the same time getting everything horribly wrong. The always game Carson Elrod plays Colonel Pickering, Higgins's partner in phonetical crime, while Matt Wolpe plays the visiting twit Freddy Eynsford Hill and Teresa Avia Lim takes on the role of his obnoxious sister Clara. After Eliza makes a less-than-stellar impression, uttering the dreaded "b-word" on her way out, we believe Mrs. Higgins when she says, "if you suppose for a moment that she doesnt give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her."
Higgins, it turns out, is perfectly cracked about her, but not in the way everybody thinks. Shaw rewrote the ending to Pygmalion multiple times, and Staller gives us yet another ending, in which the cold, remote Higgins just begins to crawl out of his shell at the end. It's a refreshing change from both overly romanticized and overly cynical versions of the story in recent years.
Pygmalion is playing at Theatre Row until November 22nd, so get your tickets now! There's also a companion event at the American Irish Historical Society tomorrow at 6pm. I'll definitely be there.
