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"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,The
moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him." -
Henry George Bernard Shaw famously refused to permit any play of
his "to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its
own." Allowing his beloved Pygmalion to be supplanted by a comic
opera was therefore unthinkable; yet Lerner and Loewe transformed
it into My Fair Lady (1956), a musical that was to delight
audiences and critics alike. By famously reversing Shaw's original
ending, the show even dared to establish a cunningly romantic
ending. Keith Garebian delves into the libretto for a fresh take,
and explores biographies of the show's principal artists to
discover how their roles intersected with real life. Rex Harrison
was an alpha male onstage and off, Julie Andrews struggled with
herchaste diva image, and the direction of the sexually ambiguous
Moss Hartcontributed to the musical's sexual coding.
Surveying his own conflicted, multi-cultural life from a Bombay
boyhood, immigration to Canada, and his re-invention as a literary
and theatre critic, poet, and editor who has learned to understand
life's blessings and wounds, Keith Garebian's autobiography is an
act of memory at the service of a changing self. Using vignettes,
letters, historical surveys, meditations, and existential
summations, Pieces of My Self shows Garebian's trauma, fury,
condemnation, ardour, melancholy, satire, and self-understanding.
Figures of Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, William Hutt, Irving
Layton, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, Henry Beissel, V.S. Naipaul, and
many others pass through this life of a restlessly critical and
self-critical author.
Christopher Newton has placed the Shaw Festival firmly on the map
of world-class theatre. His best Shavian productions are
revolutionary re-interpretations of plays that are normally treated
as Edwardian period pieces or didactic entertainments. In this
first full-length study of Newton, critic Keith Garebian shows how
the pairing of Shaw and Newton, that once seemed not bloody likely,
has become one of the most exciting enterprises in Canadian
theatre, with startling results. This book begins with a
biographical section that sketches some of the most perasive
influences on Newton's artistic sensibility, and suggests what had
particularly inspired his ever-growing fascination with Shaw.
Successive chapters document Newton's concept of Shaw as a
surrealist, and contain detailed descriptions of productions at
Niagara- on -the- Lake from 1980-1990. Among other things, readers
are shown a Caesar and Cleopatra set in a Shadow Box; Heartbreak
House as a dream-play of the night and anarchy; Major Barbara as a
double quest; You Never Can Tell as part comic romance, part
farcical metaphor; the metatheatrical suggestions of Man and
Superman; and a Misalliance as a metaphor of a convulsive new age.
As Garebian shows, Newton's approach for all its paradoxes,
succeeds in making George Bernard Shaw our dynamic contemporary.
"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him, The
moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him." -
Henry George Bernard Shaw famously refused to permit any play of
his "to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its
own." Allowing his beloved Pygmalion to be supplanted by a comic
opera was therefore unthinkable; yet Lerner and Loewe transformed
it into My Fair Lady (1956), a musical that was to delight
audiences and critics alike. By famously reversing Shaw's original
ending, the show even dared to establish a cunningly romantic
ending. Keith Garebian delves into the libretto for a fresh take,
and explores biographies of the show's principal artists to
discover how their roles intersected with real life. Rex Harrison
was an alpha male onstage and off, Julie Andrews struggled with her
'chaste diva' image, and the direction of the sexually ambiguous
Moss Hartcontributed to the musical's sexual coding.
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