Just got back from our fall Best of Broadway Theatre trip, and there's a lot to talk about.
The first play I saw was a Wednesday Evening performance of Pygmalion, starring Claire Danes, Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines. Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines performed just recently in Journey's End, the Tony-Award winning drama directed by David Grindley, who also directed this show.
This was a tight show, so the costumes, sets and lighting were all top-notch. The acting was wonderful, almost throughout. Jefferson Mays, whose tour-de-force performance in the one man show, I Am My Own Wife, has created a Henry Higgins that is unique and so well rendered that we are tempted to forget Rex Harrison. This Higgins seems more vulnerable, more human and more susceptible to working himself into a tizzy. He is frustratingly real and accessible.
Boyd Gaines, as his cohort, Pickering, was suitably British, if not a little too subtle. He is able to say so much with a proper smile or nod. His performance is highly sophisticated and sublime. Gaines, who was nominated for a 2007 Tony for his work in Journey's End, has certainly come a long way from 1982's teen sex flick, "Porky's."
Claire Danes, as Eliza Doolittle, is lovely to look at and quite good, but her performance doesn't seem to come as easy as the others. She strains to make her crying believable, and could be a little bit more sympathetic, for my money.
The long view of the show is that, at age 91(the show, not me), it's tough to sit through. Act II is very talky(it's Shaw), and the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady, made the singing seem so inevitable, that it is missed at several points through the evening. Bravo to Roundabout Theatre Company for doing revivals like this, I'm afraid that if the show sells it will be because it has a movie star in it, not because Broadway loves Shaw.
More to follow. I saw six shows and had a completely different reaction to all of them.
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