So we were there, in Logan, at the Utah Festival Opera, a beautiful theater watching first-rate productions of Kiss Me Kate, and My Fair Lady.  And so, now, I want to make this case: My Fair Lady is the worst good musical ever.  I think seeing a terrific production of it–which UFO gave us–makes the flaws of the material all the clearer. 

Look, there have been lots of horrible musicals in history.  I’ve heard stories about the musical based on Stephen King’s Carrie that would curl your back teeth. Most awful musicals, in fact, aren’t produced.  I saw one at BYU a few years ago, a musical based on Casey at the Bat that was lively and energetic and fun and completely terrible.  My Fair Lady came out the year I was born, and ran past my sixth birthday.  It was a huge, huge, massive popular hit.  It’s the definition of a great musical.

I also think it’s rotten to the core, that the book is an obscene profanation of a great artist’s work, that it only has one good song, that it took everything that was unique and smart and subversive in its source material and turned it into the most insipid of romantic comedies. 

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1912.  We all know the story: Henry Higgins, a linguist, vows to teach the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle how to speak properly, promising that she can pass for a duchess under his direction.  Higgins is a bully and a misogynist–worse than that, he’s a rotten linguist.  Linguistics is about the study of language; a good linguist loves language, loves the differences between dialects, loves pidgins and coinages and slang. Higgins is the worst kind of class snob–someone who thinks lower-class dialects are just wrong.  He’s not actually a linguist at all–he’s an phonetician, an elocutionist, someone who wants to teach people who talk ‘wrong’ how to talk ‘right.’  Instead of recognizing that everyone is multi-lingual, that everyone tailors speech to various social circumstances, Higgins tells Eliza that she’s wrong, and that he’ll make her ‘right.’  And uses various approaches, including Pavlovian conditioning, to improve her.

It’s a smart, sophisticated critique of class and the link between social class and language.  Best of all, Shaw intentionally structures the play like a romantic comedy, to strengthen his critique of how language constructs class and gender.  Eliza is a child of poverty, a slum girl.  She clings to some kind of pride, some sense of self: “I’m a good girl, I am,” she says repeatedly.  A statement of personal integrity, given how many girls from her culture ended up, in 1912, in prostitution.  Henry turns her into a lady; language becomes, for her, the path to upward mobility.  And also limits her options.  An upper-class woman, in Shaw’s society, can really only marry.  That’s about the only career option open to her.  As Nora learns in A Doll House–a play Shaw loved and admired–women are in essence forced by their culture to trade sexual favors–marriage–for economic security.  Eliza, who managed to cling to her own sense of self-definition as a ‘good girl,’ has become a duchess, whose only career choice is prostitution.  And so she does marry, marries Freddy, a sweet, somewhat empty-headed young upper-class gentleman who she is rather fond of, but never in love with, knowing that marriage can only diminish her, but seeing it as the best of her poor options. 

The musical is by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.  And here’s my problem with it–it turns Pygmalion into what Shaw never meant it to be, a romantic comedy, in which Eliza falls in love with and marries Henry.  Shaw structured the play as a romantic comedy on purpose, to critique the form, to attack gender stereotypes, as a platform for his assault on everything romantic comedy stood for.  And Eliza married Freddy, and it’s not a happy ending.  It’s bittersweet, emphasis on bitter–it’s Eliza surrendering her independence, giving up on her own best self and her own best ambitions.  It’s a tragic ending.  An Eliza ‘in love with’ Henry, is an Eliza succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome.  All that nuance, all that social commentary, disappear in the musical, are turned into cute songs and neat comic bits.  It takes an anti-romance and turns its heart to romance.  It mutes Eliza, it infantilizes her, it shuts her the hell up, by giving her pretty songs to sing.  It’s cute and fun and clever, instead of disturbing and transgressive and bold.  It dances a lively waltz on Shaw’s grave, with nimble choreography and lovely costumes. 

Precisely because the UFO production was so good, it depressed me more than ever.  And my back was killing me.  I couldn’t sit there and watch cute Eliza marry adorably rude Henry, a Henry that hides his basic decency with bluster, which she sees right through.  Blarg.  I left at the interval. 

This weekend, my wife and I went up to Logan to the Utah Festival Opera.  Michael Ballam runs the UFO, and he’s an old friend of our family, and was kind enough to arrange seats for us.  They lovingly restored a beautiful old theater, and every summer they perform a selection of operas and musicals.  I would have loved to have seen their Tosca or Faust, but couldn’t make the schedule work–instead, we saw Kiss Me Kate and My Fair Lady.  Both starred Michael’s daughter Vanessa, who we also know, and who is terrific, a wonderfully charismatic and engaging actress.  I plan to review My Fair Lady tomorrow. 

Kiss Me Kate is one of my wife’s favorite shows.  She knows the movie well–watched it all the time with her mom and sisters growing up.  I’ve seen it once before, but don’t know it well at all.  It’s a lot of fun.  The premise: a struggling theatre company is doing a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, produced and directed by Fred Graham, who will also play Petruchio.  His ex-wife, Lili Vanessi is cast as Katherine–we know from the outset they’re going to end up together.  I mean, it’s a musical.  Also in the cast, Lois Lane/Bianca, and her boyfriend Bill/Lucentio. I don’t have my program with me, can’t give you their names, but I thought they were all great.

Okay, like I said, I don’t know this musical well, but it’s Cole Porter, and I love Cole Porter.  So clever, so wickedly subversive.  Couple of points: my wife and I are old enough to have a son who turns thirty this year.  We were also about the youngest people in the theater, by twenty years.  Second point: There was a repeated joke in the production regarding the word ‘bastard.’  Someone would start to say it– ‘bast . . ‘ — and a sound effect–a horn, a buzzer– would interrupt the second half of the word. I don’t know if this is written in the script, or a directing choice for this production.

In the world of Critical Theory, one important tenet is the decentered author.  Texts are not produced by an ‘author,’ but by impersonal forces within a culture.  This is, of course, silly.  Most High Theory is amazingly silly.  (I’m not a scholar anymore, I’m retired, I can say that).  Basically, it’s just a preposterously hyperbolic way of saying ‘writers are influenced by the culture they came from.’  But Kiss Me Kate in Logan could serve as exhibit A for anyone arguing for Barthes and the absent author.  For Theory. 

Because Kiss Me Kate–the show, the script, the text, not necessarily the production in Logan, which was exceptionally well done–is sexist in a way that I found quite amazing.  It’s not just that The Taming of the Shrew is about physically ‘taming’ a tough and independent young woman, and that Kiss Me Kate is about The Taming of the Shrew.  It’s not just the sight gag built on the idea that Lili/Kate has been spanked on stage hard enough that she can’t sit down without a pillow–which Fred pulls out before she can sit on it, leading to the ‘excruciating butt pain’ bit–quite the rib-tickler, that one.  You could (barely) make the case that she hits him as often as he hits her.  But she’s infantilized in every scene.  Lili’s a proven actress, a professional, an intelligent and charming woman who, we’re told, mixes easily in Washington D.C. society.  But Fred has no difficulty convincing her Senator beau that when she says “I’m being held captive against my will,” she’s just overreacting, you know, the way dumb broads tend to do. 

So who ‘wrote’ this text?  Cole Porter?  Or the gender expectations of the late 1940’s?  (It opened in 1948, which makes sense–five years earlier, and I rather think Rosie the Riveter and  her sisters wouldn’t have sat still for it.) 

But what I found truly, truly astounding, are how wicked, how naughty it is.

Remember, this is a production in which they wouldn’t say ‘bastard.’  Too offensive, that word.  And I think it’s quite possible that some members of that audience, in Logan, probably would have found ‘bastard’ troubling.  But. . . take this song: “Too darn hot.”  Okay, it starts off the second act, it’s sung by one minor character, joined by the chorus. Point of the song: it’s very hot outside.  Too hot, in fact, to have sex.  Sings the character: “I’d like to sup with my baby tonight, and play the pup with my baby tonight” but it’s too hot.  “I’d like to stop for my baby tonight, and blow my top with my baby tonight, but I’d be a flop with my baby tonight” because of the excessive amount of heat.  Over and over again, that sentiment is expressed: the character would love to indulge in wildly tantric, Kama sutric, acrobatic sexual relations, but, alas, for the temperature. Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

That’s one of the things Cole Porter does. He writes songs that establish a premise, which he then repeats over and over, our pleasure deriving from the cleverness of his lyrics.  So the song “Always True to you in my fashion”, sung by Lois/Bianca.  The entire song involves her saying that she’d like to stay faithful to her boyfriend, but there are a number of categories of men she’d like to have sex with first, in part because of the presents they give her.  I’m not kidding.  That’s the entire song.  And don’t get me started on “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”; a series of double-entendres on every Shakespeare title that can be made to sound dirty.

Was I offended by any of this?  Not remotely.  Of course not. I loved it.  I enjoy salacious wit, I love double-entendres, I love subversive jokes and naughty humor.  I especially love it all when it’s performed with the kind of energetic gusto the Logan company brought to bear.  I love Cole Porter’s music, all those delicious half-steps.  I think “So in Love” is one of the great love songs.   

I just think it’s kind of weird.  All that Victorian old maid reticence over ‘bastard,’ followed by wink wink nod nod jab to the ribs sexual humor. All that brutal swaggering sexism, followed by Bianca’s frank sexual liberation–at least, she’s as liberated as any ‘ho.  I found the entire experience very strange.  I laughed a lot, too, and then went home and listened to a lot of Cole Porter, and enjoyed his open sophistication very much.  How sexist is the show; how seriously should we take it; how much does Porter undercut it, how much did this production deconstruct it? A lot, some, some, and I’m not sure.  And then the next day we went back and saw a show twenty times worse.

I am in awe of my sister-in-law.  She’s a wonderful person, kind and thoughtful and we love her dearly.  Her kids are all performers–they all had leads in various high school shows, and her family has been very involved in their local community theatre.  My brother has build sets for that theatre for years, and has gradually become more and more involved, to the point where he runs the organization now, and has acted in a few of their shows.  And my sister-in-law finally decided to audition for a show too–their upcoming production of the Sound of Music. It opens this next week.  And she got cast, as did he.  He’s playing Max.  She’s playing the Mother Abbess.  Which means she gets to sing “Climb Every Mountain.”  This song, in other words.  One of the most memorable songs in the history of American musical theatre.

It will be the first time in her life she sings a solo in public.

I talked to my brother today.  He says she’s doing great with it. Great part for her, and he says everyone’s rooting for her, and she’s a little nervous, but she’s excited too.

Here’s my prediction:

She won’t sleep the night before the show opens.  She won’t be able to think about anything else all day.  She’ll be terrified and excited in equal measure, all day.  She’ll arrive at the theater early, get into costume and makeup, and she’ll be her usual affable self to the other cast members, but they’ll remember her as preoccupied.  She’ll sit off-stage, awaiting her entrance, and her knees will feel weak.  You always feel it in the knees. And she’ll go over her lines over and over again, and especially the lyrics to That Song.  And then she’ll hear her cue and just for a moment, for an indescribably brief moment, she’ll freeze, she’ll nearly panic, she’ll doubt herself, she’ll wonder if she can do it.  And then her legs will move, almost unbidden, and she’ll step out on stage, into the light, and she’ll find it momentarily disorienting, the light, and behind it, the sounds, the presence of all those people.  The audience.  Friends and neighbors no more, just a thing, a single frightening creature, this monstrous audience-beast.  And then she’ll hear her cue, and she’ll say her first line, just as she’s rehearsed it.  And she’ll forget, for just a second, the audience-beast, and she’ll connect with her fellow actors, the Maria, the other nuns.  And then the music will begin, her cue to start singing.  And she’ll begin.

And she’ll rock the house.

We use violent imagery in the theatre.  “We slayed ’em,” we say.  “We killed out there.”  Because what we killed, what we had to kill, is the audience-beast, creature of our own imaginings, that amorphous animal that threatens to consume us.

Unless we tame it.

By doing what we do.

1972, I was on my way home from school, when a cute girl I had a crush on stopped me on my way to the parking lot and said, “hey, auditions are tonight.  Why don’t you come with me?”  And I followed her into the theater, and auditioned for Bloomington High School South’s production of Barefoot in the Park, by Neil Simon.  And I was called back for the character role of Victor Velasco, and I went to that callback with two thoughts in my mind. I was more frightened than I’d ever been before, of anything, ever.  Also, more than anything, I wanted that part.  Two months later, I stood backstage, and just before my first entrance, turned to the actor playing the telephone repairman, and said to him, “I quit.” He literally shoved me onto the stage.  And I said my first line.  And the audience-beast . . . laughed. 

And I thought: Oh, man. Wow.  I could get used to this.

I love actors.  I love their courage, their tenacity in clinging to a profession that will never love them as much as they love it.  I love, above all, the magic that takes place when they step out on-stage, stark bare-naked except for a costume.  And transform.  Even in bad plays, even in awful nights where the playwright was an idiot and the director’s an idiot, and the show sucks and everyone knows it, even then (and it doesn’t happen often), maybe even especially then, the courage of actors is inspirational.  They dare. And when the show’s good?  It’s the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel and Bjorling singing ‘Nessun dorma” and Hendrix doing “Bold as Love” all rolled into one.  Nothing, nothing, is better, than actors moving us, changing us, with their talent, their hard work, their sheer audacity.  It’s the greatest art form God ever created–its existence stands as witness that He loves His children. And that we are brothers and sisters together. 

And next week, my sister-in-law will join that unbroken line of heroes and heroines that stretches from Thespis through Roscius through Burbage through Duse through Olivier through Dame Maggie, to us, here, today. 

We love you, Dawn. Break a leg.