• My Not-So-Fair Lady: Those dangerous old musicals

The New York Times has decided that old musicals are a danger to society. A recent article, “The Problem With Broadway Revivals: They Revive Gender Stereotypes, Too”, complains that revivals of Carousel, My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate present women as inferior beings who endure abuse from their male counterparts: “Billy Bigelow hits Julie Jordan. Henry Higgins molds Eliza Doolittle. Fred tames Lilli.” It claims unsurprisingly that these revivals are a “huge conversation” among the #MeToo movement. (It also discusses Pretty Woman, a new musical based on the film that is scheduled to open this year.) The article quotes worried musician Georgia Stitt as saying, “In 2017 is the correct message really ‘women are there to be rescued’?”

Well, no. That’s not the message at all, and the problem isn’t the musicals but the shriveled viewpoint of those perpetual victims who turn everything they touch into proof of their own suffering. Stacy Wolf, an academic (naturally) who has written a feminist history of Broadway, calls the characters in such musicals “pathetic”, and Stitt asks rhetorically, “Are these the shows I’m going to take my 12-year-old daughter to?”

Depends on how you look it, doesn’t it? The article describes the theme of My Fair Lady as “a man transforming a woman to meet his standards”. In fact, it is about class: in Professor Higgins’ mind, the cockney Eliza was born a flower girl and will always be a flower girl even when she imitates a “lady”. He is not transforming her at all as he sees it, but simply dressing her up to win a bet. Her gender is of no interest to him.

It is Eliza, feisty and strong-willed, who takes the initiative in seeking lessons from Higgins to better herself, then walks out on him when she feels mistreated. Higgins, on the other hand, is an emotionally stunted “middle-aged bachelor…with a mother fixation” (Shaw’s description) who realizes only after Eliza has left him how much he needs her. His demand for his slippers in the final scene, when she has unexpectedly returned to him, is mischaracterized in the article. He is listening wistfully to a recording he made of her first visit to his home, and she slips in behind him, turns the machine off and quietly repeats her line. The stage directions say, “If he could but let himself, he would run to her.” Instead, he leans back and continues with his own earlier line about the slippers – not abuse but a sign of his inability to bare his emotions. The script at this point states in an aside, “She understands.” And so do we. Eliza emerges in fact as the much stronger figure.

Carousel is harder to defend, but it again shows an emotionally immature man and a woman confident enough to understand his actions in a broader context. Julie’s seeming acceptance of physical abuse is tough to take from a modern perspective (and won’t be helped by the upcoming production, where a black man will be striking a white woman), but her willingness to forgive her husband’s shortcomings for what she sees as his essential goodness is a powerful force, offering the possibility of redemption through love. The abuse is hardly condoned in any case – Billy is sent back from Heaven after his death in order to seek atonement, when his violent streak again threatens to derail his efforts. But it is Julie’s deep compassion that stands out. It’s an example worth showing again and again given the present tendency to judge people, including historic figures, solely for their perceived flaws rather than their overall characters. I think it’s worth considering the show from a wider perspective.

I don’t know what the article is talking about regarding Kiss Me, Kate’s Lilli (as opposed to The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherine, who Lilli is portraying in the show-within-a-show). Lilli is self-assured and every bit her ex-husband’s match; she is spanked by him on stage only after knocking him around physically herself, and ultimately reconciles with him on her own terms. Also, the secondary female character Lois tells her boyfriend that she’ll be true to him “in my way”, take it or leave it. Both these women sound pretty resilient to me. Note, by the way, that the script was co-written by a woman, a relatively rarity on Broadway until recently.

I don’t think ten-year-old girls are going to come out of My Fair Lady or the other shows ready to submit themselves to abusive men or thinking any less of themselves. I wish critics would relax sometimes.