![]() He has nice spells of distraction, and a particularly telling moment at the end of the play, when, after cackling derisively over his pupil's impending marriage to another man, he grows pensive and regretful. Higgins's experiment, which happens to involve phonetics and a caterwauling Cockney flower girl, is no less transforming, and he puts Eliza Doolittle through all sorts of hell before she finally claims her remade self and walks out the door.Īndrew Gillies is pretty much a standard-issue Higgins - rumpled, self-absorbed, arrogant, but not unlikable. If you think about it, however, Professor Higgins is not far removed from those mad scientists in old Hollywood films who were always trying to create life in a test tube or graft the head of a man onto the body of a wolf. ![]() Nothing else I caught was half so bold or entertaining.Ĭertainly not Shaw's "Pygmalion," which comes across in the Festival Theater, the company's flagship playhouse, as a perfectly genteel, although scarcely audacious, entertainment. Even as her eyes are popping open, she is pursing her bee-stung lips, which thereby risk disappearing altogether. Haney invests equal energy in bold starts of indignation. As he does, delight courses the length of his body, setting everything a-quiver - toenail, mustache, pinkie. Hutt proclaims at one point to his rival. I'm the anticipation: you're the disappointment," Mr. "I'm her prospective husband: you're only her actual one. Juno, oozing all the charm of a lesser reptile. Juno, like a kewpie doll's older, marginally wiser, sister and Peter Hutt, as Mr. What makes the undertaking hilarious, however, are two explosive performers: Mary Haney, looking, as Mrs. Lunn.Ī precursor of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" in many ways (there's even a balcony overlooking the ocean), "Overruled" permits Shaw to stand conventional moral principles on their heads and argue mischievously for a little faithlessness in conjugal life. Lunn is well along in his seduction of Mrs. By the time they all meet up by chance in the lounge of a seaside hotel, Mr. Juno, having decided to take separate vacations, are traveling around the world in opposite directions. ![]() It's no more than a riff on marriage and adultery, but it is quick and impudent. The liveliest production I saw was probably the most negligible - a 45-minute one act, "Overruled," which Shaw wrote in 1912 and which is presented as lunchtime fare in the Royal George Theater. The furniture they sit on will be tasteful and the silver tea set will elicit covetous glances from audience members, who, at intermission, will repair to the lobby to take tea themselves. If the playwright insists on raising nettlesome questions about the social and moral order, you can be fairly certain that his characters, at least, will be elegantly costumed and they will inhabit handsome dwellings. 1 - holds that this is the only company in the world specializing in plays about "the beginning of the modern world." Shaw himself is the patron saint, and who upset more apple carts and peered under more rocks than he? Yet there's something well bred and tidy about the productions that robs even Shaw's works of their revolutionary zeal. The official line of the festival - which runs through Nov. Little that's troublesome or unsavory makes its way onto the stages here. ![]() The picturesque seems to have gained the upper hand in the three theaters the festival operates in this admittedly picturesque town on the no less picturesque shores of Lake Ontario. And I guess I shouldn't be against that, either.īut after seeing six of the nine offerings that make up the 31st season, I somehow find the postcards indicative of a worrisome development. You can also buy postcards depicting scenes from past productions. In these days of penury, a theater troupe needs every source of revenue it can get. IN THE SHAW SHOP, THE OFFICIAL gift and souvenir boutique of the Shaw Festival, you can purchase the usual assortment of coffee mugs, T-shirts, trinkets and posters. ![]()
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