The Problem With My Fair Lady's Ending (And How To Fix It)

[Music] now my fair lady is the story of a cockney flower girl eliza doolittle who is taught to speak like the upper class by a phonetics professor henry higgins it is a beloved musical a rare flower that feels authentically english despite being written by two yanks and an irishman the movie won eight oscars including best picture and it's on tv every christmas it's been parodied on family guy and the simpsons i've grown accustomed to his faith and even my dad who cannot sing a note can sing you all i want is a room somewhere and the ending is wrong this is something that's been known about for a long time but got some attention recently in 2018 when barlett shares production opened at the lincoln center several critics mentioned that the ending was changed now share didn't change the script the music or the lyrics so what happened well to explain we have to go right back to the beginning it's well known that my fair lady is based on a george bernard shaw play but we're gonna have to go back even further than that to the source of the original story in ovid's metamorphoses in the metamorphosis the singer orpheus tells the story of pygmalion and the statue in which a mgtow sculptor called pygmalion who hates women for being vain and slutty makes himself a perfect marble waifu body pillow instead which he falls in love with and aphrodite turns her into a real boy it's not overly concerned with the statues perspective she doesn't even have a name originally later versions of the story would call her galatea ovid was one of the main writers on the curriculum for hundreds of years in europe so the story of pygmalion and galatia got turned into all sorts of paintings poems operas obviously sculptors were drawn to the subject of a master sculptor at work but it is a bit weird to look at a sculpture of a sculpture especially when it looks exactly the same as the sculpture of a man how am i supposed to know that she's [Music] the version that george bernard shaw's audience would probably be most familiar with is the 1871 play pygmalion and galatia by w s gilbert the same guy that did [Music] in this version pygmalion is already married and makes a sculpture of his wife but when galatia comes to life she's born sexy yesterday and too pure for this world so she has to be statued again it was wildly successful and revived several times during gilbert's own lifetime and then in 1913 irish playwright george bernard shaw writes pygmalion shaw is a fascinating character socialist contrarian only winner of both a nobel prize and an oscar and holder of what is by modern standards a hodgepodge of progressive regressive and just plain strange opinions his insistence on spelling won't without the apostrophe his support of interracial marriage his admiration for stalin his praise for mussolini his anti-vaccine stance his pro-eugenics comments his takedowns of anti-semitism and his promotion of a new 40-letter shavian alphabet that looks like this we don't have time to get into that here but if you're interested about that stuff shaw has probably been more written about than any anglophone writer except shakespeare so i'm sure you'll find discussion out there you can even find a whole book just of his letters to the times what what shaw wanted to tell the story from galatia's point of view and give it what he thought was a more realistic ending as if gelatin were a real woman with her own thoughts and feelings not a statue that was born sexy yesterday so he sets the story in what for him is the modern day 1910s london pygmalion is no longer a sculptor turning rough marble into art but henry higgins a phonetics professor who teaches trades people to speak like gentlemen galatia is still his masterpiece but instead of a block of marble she is eliza doolittle a cockney flower girl at the very bottom of society's ladder who is talked to speak and act like a duchess so eliza's not some diamond in the rough at the beginning of the play she whines they'll take away my character and they'll drive me on the face she's a liar you said you could change half a crown and she gets hysterical at the drop of a hat [Music] but throughout the play she gets better at mastering herself until by the end she is fiercely strong articulate and independent at the end of the play she explains that although higgins taught her pronunciation this self-mastery this most important part of her transformation hasn't come from copying his manners because he has none but from being treated with respect by his housemate colonel pickering rehearsals were tough with three very headstrong people herbert bierbaum tree as higgins misses patrick campbell as eliza and gbs himself as director on the stage but unlike in the original myth gbs believed it was impossible for pygmalion and galatia to get together at the end instead they bump into each other at his mother's house and talk things out one last time now eliza has learned self-respect they're finally on equal terms at the end eliza announces i shall not see you again professor and goes to leave he doesn't believe her he tells her to run some errands for him while she's out and buy me a pair of reindeer gloves number eight and a tie to match her new suit of mine when she refuses number eights are too small for you if you want them lined with lamb's wool you have three new ties which you've forgotten in the drawer of your wash stand what you ought to do without me i cannot imagine he still doesn't quite get it and chuckles to himself thinking she'll come crawling back sure wrote to campbell that now comes the most important point of all when eliza emancipates herself when galatia comes to life she must not relapse she must retain her pride and triumph to the end when higgins takes your arm on a consort battleship you must instantly throw him off with implacable pride he recognized the power imbalance in the relationship pygmalion is galatea's creator with a capital c how could they ever have an equal marriage he'd never stop trying to correct her the last thing he does in all versions is order her to do some housework whether that's buying him gloves or fetching his slippers but she doesn't want to be treated as a student and a skivvy for the rest of her life higgins says himself he doesn't respect eliza when she's running around after him no you're slaving for me than saying you want to be cared for who cares for a slave but eliza can't go back to her old life she doesn't fit in in covent garden anymore nobody well i can't go back to the gutter as you call it and that i have no real friends in the world but you and the colonel so she has to make her way as a lady but higgins keeps throwing her old life in her face correcting her grammar you're nearer my age and what he is bringing up her past faux pas making fun of her upbringing i tell you i've created this thing out of squashed cabbage leaves in cotton garden even while he says he doesn't care about class and treats everyone equally the great secret elijah is not a question of good manners or bad manners or any particular sort of manners but having the same manner for all human souls the question is not whether i treat you rudely whether you've ever heard me treat anyone else better so with him she couldn't really live as a lady either he'd always be undermining her also higgins is a jerk to her i mean can you imagine living with this guy he didn't slut you of course now you've been crying you look as ugly as the very devil but an idea or a fool if he does love her he's got a funny way of showing it not to mention the age gap in the script eliza is described as perhaps 18 perhaps 20 hardly older while higgins is 40 or thereabouts unless you think that sort of thing didn't matter back then eliza actually brings it up or would you rather marry pickering i wouldn't marry you if you asked me and you're nearer my age than what he is sure i absolutely forbid any suggestion that the middle-aged bully and the girl of 18 are lovers thankfully eliza isn't usually actually cast that young mrs patrick campbell was 48 to beer bone trees 61. audrey hepburn was 35 to rex harrison's 56 and in the bartlett share production lauren ambrose was actually 40 to henry haddon payton's 37 but if eliza has a better option in the guise of nice but dim freddie who's her age and loves her to bits and treats her right why wouldn't she take it shaw wrote will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching higgins slippers or to a lifetime of freddie fetching hers but audiences weren't satisfied with shaw's ending from the beginning one critic wrote that he was sure she married henry higgins and bore him many vigorous and intelligent children even the actor who originated higgins wanted to change it long after opening night when shaw went back to watch it later he found that between the last line and the curtain coming down higgins had started throwing flowers to eliza my ending makes money you ought to be grateful protested tree to which sure possibly apocryphally replied your ending is damnable you ought to be shot so to try and set the record straight he wrote a post script to the play which you can still find in printed versions of the script where he explains his reasons for eliza marrying freddie and describes what he imagines would happen after the curtain falls in his imagined sequel eliza and freddy open a flower shop together underwritten by colonel pickering so freddie takes a step down the social class coming out of gentility to become a tradesman mirroring eliza's step up they never break off contact with wimpole street entirely pickering is always lending them money and she gets handwriting lessons from higgins but eliza has her independence and doesn't have to fetch anyone's slippers anymore in that postscript gbs expresses his frustration that audiences who see a leading man and a leading lady and assume they must get together at the end people in all directions have assumed for no other reason than she became the heroine of a romance that she must have married the hero of it so in 1938 producer gabrielle pascal persuaded shaw to let him make pygmalion into a movie according to news reports at the time he turned down truckloads of money from hollywood studios for the rights only to give them to pascal for free because he liked the cut of his jib i really like this movie both the leads are fantastic and they add in stuff that makes a lot of sense to show like eliza's elocution lessons and the ball shaw was a bit nervous about their choice of leading man for higgins leslie howard was handsome and known to the public as a romantic lead yeah we'll we'll keep that taken where is shaw would rather have had a craggy faced character actor what if for the cantankerous intellectual you you cast someone who looked more like me but he wrote a screenplay for them which adapted the play to film taking out scene change stuff adding in a montage that sort of thing and he made it very clear his ending was not to be tampered with he wrote all suggestion of a love interest between eliza and higgins should be most carefully avoided so pascal really wanted to give the film a romantic ending but for wright's reasons he wasn't allowed to add in any new lines so here's the sneaky ingenious work around he came up with so they have their final scene and eliza gets into freddie's car higgins is like and he has a sad walk home he listens to her voice on the gramophone before i come out which technically isn't a new line and then bam she's back roll credits where the devil are my slippers eliza yeah let's have our final shot of the movie be the back of this hat so i guess she was just playing hard to get or something he didn't have to apologize or work on himself or address any of the very legitimate problems she brought up he barely got through the door before she was backmaking googly eyes at him one wonders what has happened to freddy did she like duck and roll out of his car and it's this movie that the musical is based on after shaw died and couldn't defend his ending anymore pygmalion was adapted into my fair lady one of the best book musicals of all time from the start the writers allen j lerner and frederick lau knew they wanted a romantic ending lerner said of shaw's original ending it's amusing but a most unsatisfactory and strange ending and nobody is fooled by it for a minute so my fair lady takes the ending of the 1938 film but sticks in a final song for higgins i've grown accustomed to her face i've grown accustomed to her face this does at least make it seem like perhaps some time has passed between her telling him she won't be coming back and although it only barely gives higgins an ounce of character development he's just as misogynistic as ever i'm very grateful she's a woman and so easy to forget and although he does look a bit sad the best he can say for eliza even in the privacy of his own soliloquy is that he's used to having her around accustomed more than any other adaptation this song really leaves the show on a melancholy wistful note in the play we leave higgins laughing himself silly over the idea of eliza marrying freddie in the 1938 adaptation he has a bit of a sad walk but he's basically fine in the musical we get this whole song about being kind of bitter and sad and lonely i was serenely independent and content before we met surely i could always be that way again and yet which is a bit of a strange ending for this genre like no big chorus number no uplifting reprise i don't think musicals can't have sad endings parade and sweeney todd spring to mind but for this era it's a little unusual instead we have the gramophone bit again and then the smallest snippet of quiet sad dialogue oh wash my face and ends before i come i did where the devil am i slippers and then the strings are like [Applause] so this ending by dint of appearing in the 1964 movie has become by far the best known by audiences and most people just accept that of course this story has a romantic ending and i do think it's an improvement on the 1938 film ending i mean it's not the back of a hat but in a post me too world i think audiences are only going to get more uncomfortable with the idea of eliza deciding that the best she can do is this guy this guy why is thinking something women never do why is logic never even try who won't even give her the security of marrying her and you may throw me out tomorrow if i don't do everything you want me to yes so that brings us to the 2018 revival at the lincoln center directed by bartlett cher cher is known for very lush faithful productions of golden age musicals where he's clearly thought about tweaking them for modern sensibilities so his fiddler on the roof used an actual israeli choreographer both south pacific and the king and i featured hey actual asians in the asian roles you wouldn't think that'd be a new thing but it is so at first this seems like an exact copy of the musical's ending and certainly they haven't changed the script but harry hadden peyton who plays higgins makes a radically different choice with his delivery foreign is the infuriating smugness the sense that he's won and was right all along if he doesn't understand exactly what he did wrong he does at least know that he fucked up he doesn't try and run roughshod over her again and rather than staring adoringly at him from the background while he puts his feet up lauren ambrose's eliza strides right off through the fourth wall down the aisle into her future now this ending doesn't make much more sense from a timeline point of view what did eliza come back for if she's not planning on staying this doesn't add anything to our understanding of their relationship that we didn't already know and it still feels a bit deflated compared to the usual high-energy finale song you'd expect in a musical like this but this ending at least feels more earned and more in character for these two people that we've spent the whole evening getting to know so kudos to butler cher for recognizing that she really cannot come back for good but is there any way we could do even better now if you're used to shakespeare for example you will be very comfortable with chopping up a script as much as you like you can cut out scenes you can set it in different locations you can switch up the genders and the races of the characters but it's much less common in revivals of musicals there are exceptions but if you're going to see say guys and dolls you can probably expect to see something that looks like [Music] this [Music] [Applause] every time partly that's because musicals are a much younger art form and mostly not out of copyright and getting the licence to put them on often requires strict adherence to the book music and even choreography of the original and even if a production team radically changes the look of the production they'll be very hesitant to meddle too much with the book especially if like in the case of my fair lady there's a beloved film version that the audience will come in with but that's not to say it doesn't happen shows like half a sixpence chess little shop of horrors mac and mabel and even showboat have all had drastic changes to their books over the years it can be done so if we were brave enough and had the rights to rewrite this more drastically could we do better what do we want for them both we want eliza to be independent and we want higgins to keep his piercing brash cleverness so them getting married doesn't make sense but we don't want them to be out of each other's lives either we remember the joy of reign in spain and we wish that could carry on forever but it can't eliza has grown up and she can't go back again in his 1964 essay the ending of pygmalion a structural view stanley solomon argues that if eliza goes back to picking up his slippers and ordering his gloves then she isn't a real galatia she hasn't fully come into her own as a formidable human being and if she's not a real galatea then higgins hasn't succeeded in his task all he's done is taught someone pronunciation which he's done hundreds of times before he hasn't made a woman i said i'd make a woman and indeed i did so what about an ending where if higgins can't make living at wimpole street any easier for eliza he can at least be proud of his accomplishment and recognize her humanity and be a little bit happy for her rather than wallowing in self-pity there is a possibility that shaw once wrote an ending like that in that same letter to mrs campbell he writes he will go out onto the balcony to watch your departure come back triumphantly into the room exclaim galatea meaning that the statue has come to life at last and curtin thus he gets the last word and you get it too now this version doesn't exist anywhere in print so presumably it was a rewrite that shaw made partway through the show's run you would have to cut the song i've grown accustomed to her face which is a scary thing to contemplate for a director it's a meaty song for your lead actor who's not going to want to let it go and the audience will be expecting to hear it but eliza gets to leave and be her own person and higgins has the satisfaction of knowing that he really has made the statue come to life eliza is completely transformed and he takes pride in his work i like this ending although modern audiences would have no idea what a galatea is or why it's relevant so the substance of the lines would have to change there's also an ending that shaw wrote for the 1938 screenplay that's along the same lines after the last scene freddy comes to pick eliza up and let's slip that they're planning on opening a flower shop together after they've gone higgins goes for his walk and pictures what shaw wrote in his epilogue eliza behind a shop counter while freddie serves customers while he's wandering about a policewoman asks him if anything's wrong no nothing wrong a happy ending a happy beginning good morning madam and strides off into the sunset in this ending both of these characters that we've grown to love get their own share of happiness with neither one subservient to the other i don't think lerner and lo were wrong to choose the more romantic ending in the 1950s they were writing for 1950s audiences and to be clear they are great writers with a very popular musical that i love i would not have spent this long talking about a show i did not love to the marrow we're very lucky with this show many popular and beautifully written shows from this era irreconcilably butt up against modern sensibilities when nancy or julie jordan decides to stay with her domestic abuser it is possible dear for someone to hit you hit you hard and it not hurt at all or when siamese people are afraid of monocles [Applause] modern audiences sort of cringe a bit the out-of-date politics in shows from this era can't help but date them and drive modern audiences away which is a shame but in the case of my fair lady i think shaw has left us a way to refresh it for modern audiences but may well be its saving grace henry higgins a phonetics henry higgins a phonetics professor phonetics professor henry higgins phonetics professor henry higgins phonetics professor henry higgins phonetics professor henry higgins phonetics professor henry higgins

Channel: J. Draper

Views: 229,283

Keywords: musical, theatre, lerner and loewe, my fair lady, pygmalion, george bernard shaw, eliza doolittle, henry higgins, audrey hepburn, rex harrison, broadway, west end, alan jay lerner, frederick loewe, bartlett sher, lincoln center, lauren ambrose, henry hadden-paton, musicals, musical theatre, leslie howard, wendy hillier, gabriel pascal

Id: p8YrC48r3hc

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/fidelkastro]

Very interesting and very in depth. I've only seen the movie version but I'm surprised she never touched on the suggestion that Higgins and Pickering are a gay couple and that is the reason for the lukewarm love affair between Eliza and the professor.

That doesn't excuse Higgins from being a jerk though