"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.