Pygmalion

MF, Kevin, Jo and I watched Pygmalion yesterday. The promo bit below was irresistible to theater-goers with a penchant for language play and the like.

A tale about language, class, manners and matters of the heart that is as true today as it was at the beginning of the last century. And given Malaysia's unique penchant for the use and misuse of English; the opportunities for Manglish, malapropisms and hilarious turns of phrase are fantastic.

When MF managed to get good seats at 40% off (thanks to Maxis One Club), we decided to go ahead and watch the local play that was based on Pygmalion (from which My Fair Lady was based upon).

Pygmalion is a character from the Roman poet Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses. Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made.

Pygmalion, son of Belus, was a lonely sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. He prayed to Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, who took pity on him and brought the statue to life. ~ excerpt taken from here

By then, our expectations were quite low, thanks to some bad reviews that we read. But since we've bought the tickets already, we have no choice but to go ahead lah.

Throughout the show, I couldn't help comparing it to the wonderful experience I had watching My Fair Lady on vcd. How real the chemistry was between Eliza Doolittle and gruff Prof Higgins. How well-crafted the story line was, that the only bits that seemed draggy were the parts that featured Eliza's dad.

Our local Pygmalion rated quite low in those areas. I couldn't feel the connection between the two leading casts. At several points of the show I actually found myself yawning and nodding away sleepily because I found it draggy. Or maybe I had that huge fishhead curry to blame? Sadly, I found most of the language jokes in the first half of the show to be rather unfunny.

Hmmm, and oh, I felt that they should have done away with Lisa's dad's role. I couldn't see how having him in the story line actually added anything to the whole show. Instead of his long and draggy scenes, I felt that they should have put in the scene where Lisa started learning how to pronounce words correctly and use it to show a growing bond between the tutor and the student.

What made this play not a total waste of our time was the vocal talent that Michelle Quah had. Man, were we mesmerised by the pure poetry and power in her amazing voice. The supporting chorus girls had wonderful voices as well. But the best supporting actress has got to be Sarah Sharum - the lady who played the fun and brazenly sexy role of 'Mrs. Pearce'. In the hands of a less seasoned actor, that role could have been over-acted and gave the audience heart palpitations of the bad kind. But Sarah played the role so well and in such a tasteful way that I felt like I wanted to rush out and get myself a cute maid's costume as well. In short, I wished I could act like her!

I didn't realise that Harith couldn't sing all that well until he had to sing in a duet with Michelle. Gosh, the gap between the non-singer (Harith) and the professional vocal trainer (cun mommy Michelle) was so apparent that I wondered why they had to put poor Harith through that. Well, at least the man could sing in tune and he gave it all he had, gutsy guy that he was. A lesser man would have chickened out of it.

I guess it was unfair to compare our local production to the hugely successful 1964 movie but I couldn't help it lar. The effort was commendable but there's still a long way to go.

We had a wonderful supper afterwards at Nailis - an interesting makan place that was nicely built to resemble a fishing village - complete with huts up the trees where you can eat closer to the sky. And on the way back home, we had a listen to the My Fair Lady broadway soundtrack and that reminded us of why we came out in the first place. To support our local arts effort to someday be of international standard fare.