Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw | play | 1912
My Fair Lady
George Cukor (dir.) | film | 1964
Photo courtesy of Everett
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady, which premiered on Broadway in 1956 and in George Cukor’s film version in 1964, was based on the 1938 film of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, for which the playwright wrote the script. (Upon winning an Oscar for the adaptation, Shaw remarked, “It’s an insult for them to offer me any honor.”) Aside from its happy ending—which Shaw would have detested—the musical version stays remarkably true to Shaw’s 1912 original, putting into song with wit and sophistication the playwright’s concern with social issues that remained relevant in the intervening years, especially class-consciousness and feminism. “Without You” is Shaw’s comment on the English class system: Eliza assures the socially superior Henry Higgins, “England still will be here without you…They can still rule the land without you, Windsor Castle will stand without you.” Higgins touches on the sexual politics that bubble through Shaw’s work when he sings “A Hymn to Him (Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man).” In the end even the old misogynist acknowledges Eliza’s accomplishments. “Now you’re a tower of strength, a consort battleship,” he tells her in the final scenes. “I like you this way.”
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