"On The Street Where You Live" is a marvelous song, as are many others from MFL; I just wish they were in some other musical so I could enjoy the context as well as the songs.

I mean, for heaven's sake, Shaw wrote an afterword to the play that was, IIRC, some forty pages or so, explaining in excruciating detail exactly why Eliza would never return to Professor Higgins, why she would marry her pretty but callow intellectual inferior, and why she'd be glad of it in the end. Shaw was entirely on the side of Higgins's mother: He treated Eliza with a sort of indulgent contempt, he didn't see her as anything like an equal, and even if he knew deep down that she really was, he would never bend enough to acknowledge it openly.

Pretty inferior boy? Dim, but at least he knew it, and he knew Eliza wasn't. He may have been frivolous and foolish and he may have idealized her and doted on her to a mildly sickening degree, but he was idealizing and doting on her brains, her wit and her drive as well as her prettiness. He knew he was neither a match nor a catch for her in anything but social standing and wealth, and it didn't stop him from loving her in the least. Shaw's position was that no matter his inferiority to Higgins on many accounts, he could and would provide Eliza with the freedom to be herself, and be admired and loved all the more for it.

The musical certainly has its virtues, but I'm pretty sure that if Shaw hadn't been already dead, the ending would have killed him. Actually, I'm pretty sure that Lerner and Loewe would never have dared write it while he was still alive.

my all-time favorite romantic comedy, I Know Where I'm Going

Squee! Not my very favorite, but oh so wonderful.

But didn't Shaw romanticize the ending for the Hiller/Howard movie version that he adapted? IIRC, it was definitely more in line with MFL than the original play.

But didn't Shaw romanticize the ending for the Hiller/Howard movie version that he adapted? IIRC, it was definitely more in line with MFL than the original play.

I don't remember -- it's been so long since I saw the film, and it was a tape from a crappy print with lots of sound distortion, so my memory of it is very fuzzy. But the essay at the end of an earlier edition of the play is seared on my memory.

If he went and pussied out on the ending to please the movie people, I'm'a dig him up and kick his dead ass.

Yeah, but even in the first production of the play, the actors added a bit of business with flowers which implied that Eliza ends upo with Higgins. It made Shaw apoplectic, but despite his treatise on the economic sense of Eliza ending up with Freddy and opening a flower shop, I always thought she ended up with Higgins. I think he can learn to see her as the wonderful thing that she is--after all, if a lovely man like Pickering can be Higgins' friend, there must be something to him

I'd personally rather see her end up with Pickering. I love Higgins as a character, but as an actual human being he'd be fairly odious. He doesn't deserve her. IMO, anyhow. YHigginsMV.

If I recall correctly (and I admit I get the stories confused in my mind), the undeserving depiction of Higgins is more accurate for the Pygmalion version than the MFL version. They changed more than the ending for the musical - they made Higgins himself more likeable, more deserving of the ending they gave him.

Basically, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" makes me incredibly emotional, and shows me a Higgins that can appreciate Eliza.

And with that, I'm done defending it.

Into the Woods is good, too. Discuss. Or don't, since there's no movie version, alas. Why don't we have a musicals thread?

since there's no movie version, alas.

There is the version PBS broadcast lo these many years ago.

Which is actually available on DVD. Original cast, on a stage, and all, right? I have it. It's fabulous. Available for several of the Sondheim musicals. I have Sweeney Todd, too (though I haven't watched it yet), and Sunday in the Park with George is on my wishlist for this holiday.

I need to see Sweeney and George. I adore Into the Woods. With that one, I think there are defiantely effects you get from the music that you'd be hard-pressed to convey without. Which sort of makes sense, as there is that larger-than-life-ness about the whole thing (however human the characters may be)

The 1938 version of Pygmalian is available on dvd. . . a Criterion edition.