SAN DIEGO For some theatergoers, George Bernard Shaw's classic 1913 play "Pygmalion"

is "My Fair Lady" without the songs and traditional romantic ending. But returning to the source
of Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner's beloved musical reminds us that Shaw's marvelous
comedy contains its own music an ebullient symphony of wit and wisdom too honest to
pander to convention and too amusing for anyone to object.
Nicholas Martin's charmingly acted revival at the Old Globe, starring Robert Sean Leonard as
Professor Henry Higgins and Charlotte Parry as Eliza Doolittle, honors the many hues of Shaw's
work.
Shifting from daring social critique to old-fashioned romance to keen character study, the play is
acutely mindful of the way life is inextricably political. For Shaw this had less to do with party
affiliation than with the recognition that human relations are ultimately about power and
therefore about class and gender. His ability to convey this with a lightness of touch, to instruct
without being ponderous, lifted him into the circle of playwriting immortals.
Martin respects both the frivolity and seriousness of Shaw's reworking of the old Pygmalion
myth, best known from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," about the sculptor who falls in love with the
female figure he's carved out of ivory. Shaw's update, which also contains echoes of the
Cinderella tale, gives us the dream as well as the morning misgivings fantasy and shrewd
reality blended to enhance a thinking person's pleasure.
The play hinges on a wager: Higgins, a phonetics expert, makes a bet with a distinguished
colleague, Colonel Pickering (a pitch-perfect Paxton Whitehead), that he can transform Eliza, a
cockney flower girl, into a duchess in three months. The experiment is a brilliant success, but can
a person feel grateful for being treated like a lab rat even if her etiquette and enunciation are now
as impeccable as her newly bought clothes? More important, can someone be ripped from her
social context without revealing the ruse of society's hierarchies?
"Pygmalion" starts as a playful venture but quickly develops into an X-ray of a stratified nation.
Yes, it remains a love story, but one that understands just how profoundly the romantic is
political.
Leonard is such an appealing stage actor, one who naturally draws audiences whisperingly close
to him, that it wasn't clear if he'd have the necessary sternness to play Higgins, whose disregard
for niceties borders on the pathological.
But Leonard captures the emotional cluelessness of a linguistic researcher who cares more for
pronunciation than people. At the same time, pacing around his handsome study (expertly
designed by Alexander Dodge), Leonard's Higgins remains sympathetic enough in his cute
cardigan and distracted manner for us to understand Eliza's regard for him.
In following the journey Shaw has prepared for Eliza, Parry starts as a shrieking cartoon and
ends as a complex woman whose growing knowledge of the world only intensifies her desire for

independence. The humor of Parry's early scenes dissipates as Eliza's manner becomes more
respectable, but the emotion deepens as the character feels the disappointment of not being seen
by the man who remade her.
Martin's supporting cast is superb. Kandis Chappell, destined to offer a definitive Mrs. Higgins,
supplies one here. It's no surprise that her son is still under the spell of this elegant, freethinking
woman who zeroes in on souls the way Higgins zeroes in on accents.
Whitehead's Colonel Pickering is the consummate gentleman scholar. Indeed the portrait is so
well pulled off that you hate to think Eliza might not be going back to Wimpole Street to live
with Higgins and the Colonel in a setup of bachelor bliss that is perhaps the most contrived
aspect of Shaw's oddly sexless world.
As Mr. Doolittle, Eliza's ne'er-do-well father, Don Sparks manages to steal every scene he's in
while instantly conceding the stage once his character's inverted moralizing is through. Deborah
Taylor's Mrs. Pearce, Higgins' indispensable housekeeper, brandishes a knowledge of human
nature that gives her an authority well beyond her station.
Robbie Simpson's Freddy, the young man from the modest middle class who falls head over
heels for Eliza, has a goofy smile and an eager-to-please manner that could be reined in a jot. He
seems more like Higgins' disdainful impression of the character than the fellow who will
eventually win Eliza's hand.