![]() ![]() On screen, Higgins and Eliza share no overt affection, and yet “tension between them is palpable from start to finish,” Dominic McHugh writes in Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. That possibility ramps up between the stage and the screen. Lerner’s My Fair Lady, however, brings the possibility of love between Higgins and Eliza back into focus. Instead of the romantic comedy that the story would morph into as My Fair Lady, Shaw intended his play as a challenge to Britain’s classist, sexist status quo. Unlike many men in his day, especially stuffy, old-guard academics like Higgins, Shaw believed in women’s suffrage. Pygmalion came out in 1913, five years before women in Shaw’s Britain won the right to vote. Instead, he focuses on class and, surprisingly, the rights of women. Pygmalion deemphasizes love: Shaw was adamant that Eliza and Higgins aren’t supposed to end up together. The same basic premise remains in Lerner’s musical stage adaptation. So Higgins attempts to shape her speech as well as her etiquette. It’s true that Eliza is poor, but her main problem is that she lacks class. In Pygmalion, cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle seeks speech classes from Henry Higgins so she might someday work in a flower shop. Higgins never would have experienced such an emotional response to a woman’s actions if she wasn’t already burrowing into his heart.Įven in Pygmalion, the 1913 play by George Bernard Shaw, the emphasis is on the reversal, but it’s perhaps more a reversal of class than a commentary on gender roles. Because while Higgins is cultivating a little good breeding in Eliza, she is charming him. Even for the 50s, an era that has become the poster child for sexism, Higgins’s lines read as black-and-white, empty misogynist pomp. Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside?ĭespite an increasingly obvious amount of values dissonance between the musical’s era-the 1950s-and today’s consciousness of gender and sexuality in their myriad forms, it’s clear that the audience is not supposed to like Higgins’s character at this point. Straightening up their hair is all they ever do. Why is thinking something women never do? While this song has caused a bit of speculation about Higgins and Pickering-are they living together or are they living together?-what’s more obvious about the song is the overt misogyny it shows in Higgins’s character: In the sequence, Higgins asks his companion Colonel Pickering, “Well, why can’t a woman be like you?” They have a back-and-forth, with Pickering touting his finer qualities in short quips. The lyrics to “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” (which is also sometimes called “A Hymn to Him”) riff on the title phrase. The possibility of things unseen was tantalizing for the mid-century American audience. But for others, it’s the tension of ambiguity that draws us in.īy the time Lerner reached his hotel, he already had the idea that would become the song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” which Lerner calls “a perfect second act vehicle through which Higgins could release his rage against Eliza for leaving him.” “But it stuck in my mind.”įor many viewers, it is the sexual tension between Higgins and Eliza that creates the movie’s mystique. ![]() “I said that I did not think that was the solution and we walked on,” Lerner later wrote in his memoir, The Street Where I Live. He expresses a preference for men as well, but since this is the 50s, sexuality and the deed itself must always remain in the offing, forever the tension beneath the surface of the moment. He’s well-dressed, worldly, and knowledgeable about culture. ![]() He is a lifelong bachelor, an upper-class man of means, sophisticated and bored. Higgins is certainly coded as a certain gay stereotype. Would making Higgins gay solve his star’s presence problem? Past love affairs with women had wrung Harrison and Lerner both dry. His presence faded so much in the second act that Harrison became restless. More importantly, they’d also set out to discuss the trouble with Harrison’s character. They were walking along Fifth Avenue, discussing their love lives while the play was still in rehearsals. “Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?” Rex Harrison, the actor who played Henry Higgins in the 1956 Broadway version of My Fair Lady joked to the show’s playwright, Alan Lerner. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |