<b>PYGMALION</b> Festival Theatre/Shaw Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Shaw Festival
Through October 24
PYGMALION Festival Theatre/Shaw Festival

By Augustine Warner

No, this isn’t Henry Higgins and Col. Pickering dancing around a luxury flat with a reformed and recreated guttersnipe.
Instead, the Shaw Festival is featuring George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” dramatic base for Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady.”
Director Peter Hinton has moved the entire show to 2014 London, with all that entails, except for cell phones.
The difficulty with shifting a play a like this from a peculiar and particular time and era is that it doesn’t always hold together.
Fortunately for the ghost of Shaw, the final scene really holds together, the confrontation between an acrobatic and athletic Higgins (Patrick McManus) and Doolittle (Harveen Sandhu) in Mrs. Higgins’ (Donna Belleville) home, here rethought as an atelier.
It skips the little details like Higgins with his bike and bike helmet and his home on
Wimpole Street filled with an array of computer equipment bigger than the broadcast shop where I work.
The question at the heart of the show is different from when Shaw first put it on stage in 1913, in German.
Then, it was just assumed it was beneficial to turn Eliza Doolittle from the poor seller of flowers in Covent Garden to someone fit to hang out with the aristocrats, speaking with their posh accents.
We don’t feel that same way today, not sure we should require everyone to show their social and economic class in the way they speak.
For Americans and probably for Canadians, that means dealing with people in Britain whose English is unintelligible to us.
I’ve had it happen to me.
The director, presumably at the direction of Shaw leadership, has tried to create a multi-cultural London of today, which looks a lot like Toronto and its hundreds of thousands of “New Canadians.”
Pickering has just returned from Afghanistan, more in keeping with 2014 than returning from India.
That part of the production is fine, it’s those little details like assuming Eliza won’t know everything about the world around her which is immediately available to anyone who goes on line, as Higgins’ computer equipment suggests anyone can do.
Oh, and those cell phones.
As with so many Shaw productions, the show is carried along on the backs of the cast, Sandhu, Jeff Meadows’ Pickering and Peter Krantz’ crazed Alfred Doolittle on EO Sharp’s dazzling and shifting set.
The essential story remains valid and revealing, the girl looking for something better and the two men who do something because they can in reshaping Eliza, a linguistic boot camp at Parris Island.
That’s why “Pygmalion” is worth seeing, even with the holes caused by the time shift.
It’s Shaw’s basic script, some really fine acting from Sandhu and Krantz and others and the philosophic question.
Go.