'My Fair Lady' changes with the times

In new version Henry Higgins gets his comeuppance

Note: I wrote this essay three years ago, in early March of 2020, shortly after my wife and I had attended the musical at the Wharton Center on the Michigan State University campus. It seems a lifetime ago, not because three years represents a lengthy passage of time, but because it was on the eve of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The virus had only recently crossed the Atlantic from Europe, where it had infected a large number of residents in several countries on that continent earlier in the year. A few people attending the play wore face masks, but otherwise we behaved in usual fashion—meaning few of us were worried about being in a crowded indoor venue where the disease could more easily spread.

It was not long after that the emergency was declared in Michigan, along with many other parts of the country, and attending a play or other public entertainments was no longer an option. The changes that occurred as a result of the pandemic have been multi-faceted—not the least of which was our respective reaction to the situation, whether is was trying to avoid infection by following the guidelines or sluffing them off as no big deal and in a larger sense how we interacted with those whose response was different than our own.

Was the emergency declaration and what it required a necessary sacrifice on behalf of the common good or an abridgment of personal freedom? Well, that discussion has been going on for much of the past three years—and is still a backdrop to many disagreements and disputes on other matters.

Anyway, back to the musical. I remember reading the notes in the playbill we got as we entered the Great Hall at Wharton Center. They told of how this revival would be taken across the nation in the coming year and how the actress playing Eliza Doolittle was excited about the opportunity it presented, given that this was her first starring role in a major production.

Well, as we know, there would not be a long tour across the country and the opportunity for the young actress—this one anyway—would be a dream delayed. Or at least that’s the hope as opposed to one never realized.

Aspiration, despite the obstacles, is a powerful human motive. We witness it in real life and in viewing ‘My Fair Lady’.

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‘My Fair Lady’ changes with the times

Having seen the movie version of ‘My Fair Lady’ several times over the years, plus a live version of the musical put on by a community theater troupe from Hastings, I knew how the show would end.

The esteemed Professor Henry Higgins, a member of London’s upper class in the year 1912, has found the tables turned on him in his relationship with Eliza Doolittle. She is the former flower girl of humble circumstances, with a horrible Cockney accent that he had found offensive, who could now pass as a fine English lady—in fact had become just that.

Instead of being grateful and behaving in a humble and subservient manner, the young lady had shown an independent streak. The student had informed her teacher that she could “bloody well” get along without him, declining his offer that she return to his home.

The teacher (kicking and sputtering all the way) was learning a lesson in humility and the fact that the world, as Eliza said, didn’t revolve around him.

So, upon being rejected, then singing a remorseful song of having become “accustomed to her face,” the professor puts on a recording of Eliza’s voice.

But then the familiar finale occurs. Eliza shows up. Attempting to suppress his joy, but also wanting to regain a bit of the upper hand, he responds to her presence by saying “Where the devil are my slippers?”

It had been his asking Eliza to find his slippers earlier in the play that had ignited her initial show of independence and individuality, but also the vulnerability of wondering what was to become of her now that she had become a lady. It included a plea to be treated with respect and dignity, along with a declaration that she had feelings, too.

Not getting a suitable response from this gentleman, faced with his self-centeredness and callous disregard for her future, she leaves the household with suitcase in hand. Now, at the play’s end, we find Professor Higgins not quite giving up his highhanded ways or ready to offer an apology for how he’s treated her. And we find Miss Doolittle, despite having staked out her independence and turned the tables a bit, returning to the house, apparently relenting a bit.

Love, if that’s what this tug-of-war between them had become, would once again conquer all.

But not so fast.

In this revival of ‘My Fair Lady’ that was recently staged at the Wharton Center on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing—and which was viewed on a Sunday afternoon by my wife and I, along with a few hundred other theater-goers—Eliza did not give an indulgent smile to the question of the slippers as she did in the 1964 movie or, I assume, as she did in 2,717 performances of the original show after it opened on Broadway on March 15, 1956.

Instead, in this version that we were watching, she went up to the professor, patted him on the side of his check, and walked away.

As the curtain came down and the audience rose to its feet to applaud, I turned to Dawn and asked, “Did she leave him?”

 If so, it was an O Henry ending. Quite unexpected.

The movie and Broadway play had offered the proverbial ‘happy ending.’ While not quite sure, we could assume they would be together. However, if she had instead bid adieu, then we were left with ambiguity—other than we had witnessed “a woman coming into her powers.”

Returning to my own home, not able to abide this uncertainty, I did some research on the internet and eventually got my explanation.

This Lincoln Center Theater revival—after a critically-acclaimed run in New York City and now on a national tour with Michigan State University being among the stops—did indeed have her walking away.

Professor Higgins’s abusive language, his domineering behavior, and his ill treatment of Eliza during much of the play had caused what one reviewer called a “# me too” ending, referring to the push back by women against the sexual harassment and innuendo, in some cases the sexual abuse, as well as the overall gender inequality that had been experienced by them over the years at the workplace or in social relationships.

 Add the age-old curse of domestic abuse—physical, verbal, and psychological—to the mix and the organizers of the show, it seems, did not wish for Henry to be rewarded with the usual ending.

Professor Higgins, you might say, is the victim of changing times and attitudes. Language and behavior that was tolerated or even found acceptable in the 1950s and 1960s when the musical and movie initially appeared, sound different given our heightened awareness of the many forms of abuse and society’s growing intolerance of this form of behavior.

In the play, Professor Higgins calls Eliza a guttersnipe and soiled cabbage leaf, tells the servants to use the rod if she resists taking her first bath, threatens to throw her back into the street, and, in general, uses his position of power and wealth to bully her, not to mention mocking how she talks—which is how the story got started.

 Art—our interpretation of it and how we view it—can also change. As we grow older and possibly wiser, we might well look at the world with different eyes; judge matters and situations in a new or altered light.

Of course, in making this observation, I’ll note that art is fixed and it’s we, the audience, that changes. But, even so, there are forms of art that, given the changing times and attitudes, offer the possibility of re-definition.

The argument could be made that “art is art” and ought not be altered, as the ending of ‘My Fair Lady’ was. After all, you wouldn’t put a wide grin on the original Mona Lisa or have Huckleberry Finn decide to turn in Jim for being a runaway slave.

Yet the movies and Broadway are notorious for making revisions to novels or tweaking true-life stories that they film or stage—not to mention re-writing history to suit their creative or commercial needs.

 It should be added that, even with the happy ending, the Lerner & Lowe musical did not treat Professor Higgins kindly. While they might have left him off the hook by having Eliza come back, he was still lampooned and cut down to size.

The play also was less-than-flattering to the aristocrats and their upper-class manners and pretensions, particularly when contrasted to the life of the lower class.

All that said, it was the music and all those exquisite songs, along with the delightful characters and an entertaining plot, that filled the theater on the Sunday we attended, and what has made this musical an American classic.

There are two scenes in the play that stand out among a host of memorable ones. One is when Eliza is trying to properly say “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.”

It’s three in the morning. The young lady is understandably exhausted and ready to give up when Higgins shows a heretofore unseen soft spot by giving an eloquent speech “about the beauty and history of the English language” and how it can transform her.

This is the dream that had brought her to the house, asking Higgins to give her lessons on how to improve her speech so she might be able to open a flower shop rather than sell them on the street—the means of lifting herself up from her difficult situation.

So, with that encouragement, she tries one more time, “gets it,” and suddenly the threesome (Higgins, Eliza, and Colonel Pickering) are giddy with happiness, and even dance. From there the plot morphs into the great song “I Could Have Danced All Night” and hints that the relationship between the two may be evolving into something besides the battle between the hard, seemingly cruel taskmaster and his stubborn pupil.

But there is another aspect to the song and that is her “exhilaration of success”—her first inkling that the dream is becoming a reality and the hard work paying off.

The other scene that stands out is when Higgins attempts to get her to come back after she had left; his realization that he misses her. Eliza tries to explain how she wants to be treated, how she wants to be viewed—not as a flower girl of low circumstances pretending to be a lady, but as a human being worthy of being treated in the same manner as any other lady regardless of what station in life she might have come from or is part of.

For lack of a better description, it is her “I matter” speech. And by extension “We all matter—rich or poor, low class or upper, man or woman.”

If Eliza had stayed, then I would have had my familiar ending and left the theater humming the great tunes, pleased and entertained.

But by her walking away as she does in this latest version, I was prompted to look deeper into the matter of why the change and, in doing so, saw the musical in a new and altered light, able to view it from a different perspective.

 And that’s what art (at its best) does, or can do. 

Times change and Eliza Doolittle is no longer a ‘fair lady’ formed by another, but an even ‘fairer lady’ of her own making. . . no doubt unsure of what lay ahead, but determined nonetheless to face the future on her own terms, buoyed by her own talents and fortitude.

I think that’s a fine way to end the play.

Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and editor-publisher of the ‘Fowlerville News & Views’—a weekly newspaper.