Just You Wait! And Wait! And Wait...

I'm very fond of musicals. Up 'til this weekend, I'd seen every big-name classic film musical, save one - that being Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady. I like to watch famous movies I've never seen; might as well see what's all the fuss is about, right?

Man. First The Long Riders, now this. It just wasn't my weekend for movies.

Adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady tells the tale of how a phonetics professor, who appears to have been the template for the title character of House, M.D., teaches an English guttersnipe how to pass for a noblewoman so that he can win a bet and get a one-up on hundreds of people at the same time. As a musical...well, it may very well be the worst I've ever seen. It clocks in at over three hours, and that time is ill-spent on poor pacing, redundancy, incoherent editing (especially the cut between "there's six weeks 'til the ball!" and "hey, it's the night of the ball!") and the fact that every musical number runs at least two or three minutes too long - which, in music, is much longer than it sounds on paper. It felt like an amateur production; as Corey observed, it was like watching the work of someone who was good enough to write songs, but not good enough to know when to finish them. And there are some good songs here - or they would be good, if they didn't keep going like the proverbial Energizer Bunny. At any rate, I couldn't believe how long it took Lerner and Loewe to say so little, and when the intermission appeared on screen, I could only sit there in stunned disbelief that there was a whole half left. Nothing about this film warranted an intermission and, were it well-made, it wouldn't need one, because there was nowhere close to enough story to stretch over three-plus hours. On top of that, it's full of rip-offs from earlier, better musicals. The most notable of these is the "The Rain In Spain" sequence, an early-morning epiphany song and dance which feels and looks like (and probably is) a very inferior knock-off of Singin' in the Rain's "Good Morning."

As for the story, it's a load of crap. I've neither seen nor read Pygmalion, but if My Fair Lady is true to its source material, I may need to agree with G.K. Chesterton's assessment of Shaw as (I paraphrase here) the only person to never have written a bit of poetry. Unless, of course, this story's meant as a satire, which would change my views on it considerably. I described Professor Henry Higgins as a template for Hugh Laurie's House, and he is. A narcissist, a hedonist, and an all-around bastion of arrogance who gets his kicks by believing himself better than everyone else in the room (and outside of it), there's nothing to attract either Eliza or the audience to old Henry. He has no significant change of heart, he is not transformed by his realization that he's become dependent on Eliza, he - like House - does not grow as a character at all. His ultimate apology for his horrific treatment of her and everyone else is no apology, but an explanation that she's looking at it all wrong: it's not that he singles her out for bad treatment, he treats everyone like crap! And it's just the way he is, and he can't (false: he won't) change. And Eliza spurns someone who loves her (perhaps because he's such an ill-written character?) to return to Higgins in the end, which in my books makes her either a masochist or a fool. Or perhaps both. Or perhaps the author is suggesting that abused women returning to their abusers is a good thing, as Eliza's return ends the film on a triumphant note. What I'm trying to say is, this show makes a mockery of love, relations, and self-discipline. By the time this beast was over, I was so bored and offended that I had to put on Once - a truth-speaking, very well-made film that, by its very nature is the righteous opposite of My Fair Lady - in order to not spent the evening completely irked.

A lot of people love this musical. Some reviewers have had the lack of presence of mind to describe it as the perfect musical. Look - there's only so far the entertainment of such an outrageous character as Eliza can take a show. It certainly can't take it through three-plus hours of redundant dialogue, bad pacing, overstuffed songs, and some of the stupidest love-related values every conceived. Do yourself a favour and watch instead a musical that doesn't suck, like The Sound of Music, or South Pacific, or Singin' in the Rain - that last one doesn't even need an intermission, and the first two earned theirs.