Claire Danes Wants to be Your Fair Lady

When Claire Danes makes her entrance in the opening scene of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, she is unrecognizable. With her hair unbelievably messy under a large hat and her face covered in soot, she hardly looks like the woman whose glamour shot graces the playbill and advertisements. But after a few scenes playing Eliza Doolittle, she is transformed into a lovely, poised lady.

Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of the classic play—the basis for the movie My Fair Lady—opened last night at the American Airlines Theater on Broadway. Danes is not the only big name headliner: it co-stars Jefferson Mays as Henry Higgins and Jay O. Sanders as Mr. Doolittle.

Pygmalion is Broadway done the old-fashioned way. There’s no shortage of things to look at, from the elaborate period costumes to the even more extravagant sets. Pygmalion takes place in 1913 London and the designers did not shy away from showing off the wealth of the Henry Higgins set.

The story is an age-old tale of personal transformation and social mobility. Eliza Doolittle is a flower girl in Covent Garden when the linguist Henry Higgins scrapes her off the streets. On a bet with fellow linguist Colonel Pickering (ably portrayed by Boyd Gaines), he takes her into his house to teach her how to speak “properly.” The idea is, after six months of Higgins’s teaching, she’ll be able to be passed off as a duchess at a Buckingham Palace ball.

Mays’s Higgins is patently unbearable, and extremely well-acted. Genius though he is, the man never learned manners and embarrasses his own mother with his lack of courtesy. The problem is that Higgins never grew up.

Danes, likely one of the most talented actresses of her generation, does not disappoint. She captivates the audience with her presence, even without words. She is presented with a difficult task: to portray an accent not her own—Doolittle’s original Cockney accent—and then change to another. She carries it off fairly well, but one can just barely hear her American speech through the film of the accent. Danes has done an impressive job with the transition from film to stage acting, which is often very difficult. She commands the stage and channels her character, despite never having seen even My Fair Lady.

But in the end, the parents steal the show. Higgins’s mother (Helen Carey) and Mr. Doolittle are polar opposites—she is extremely high-class and forever entertaining, and he is an impoverished-laborer-turned-rich-lecturer. Ultimately, they come together because of their wisdom. It’s wisdom much different from Higgins’s intelligence, and Eliza and Pickering have some of it too. It’s a sort of intuition and world-weariness, and the knowledge of how to behave and treat other people.

Although Danes is transformed from disheveled flower girl to elegant lady, it is Higgins who makes the most interesting changes. Sheltered his whole life in his linguistic bubble, and pandered to by his mother and housekeeper, he has never been challenged by someone the way Eliza challenges him. He will never change some of his ways, but his interaction with Eliza makes him into a new and better person.

Pygmalion is a welcome departure from crowd-pleasing musicals and experimental, minimalist theater. It reminds the audience of what Broadway must have been like at its peak. A talented ensemble and visionary creative team make this relic a worthwhile two-and-a-half hours.