Well, and once again, Your Humble Blogger has been given a part in a community theater show, which means that this Tohu Bohu will get a bunch of notes over the next three months about Theeyater, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it gets very few notes about anything else. I mean, that’s a lot of time eaten up with one thing and another.
At any rate, this time the play is Pygmalion, and YHB will be playing Alfred P. Doolittle. No songs, I’m afraid. No “Little Bit of Luck”, no “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”. But I get to be undeserving. And half Welsh.
The problem with Doolittle is getting away from Stanley Holloway. He was terrific, and a magnificent showman, and it’s nearly impossible to read the lines that he said in the film version of My Fair Lady without hearing his intonation. It’s much worse with Henry Higgins and Rex Harrison, of course, although truth be told, with a lot of Doolittle’s lines, there really is only one way to read them properly, and that’s what Stanley Holloway did, and that’s what Wilfrid Lawson did, and I suspect that’s what George Rose did and what Arthur English did and Emrys James and Jay O. Sanders and John Mills and Melville Cooper and Douglas Campbell and Henry Travers and the rest of them. Well, and my part will be substantially cut, of course. It’s community theater, we have to get these people home and in bed by eleven, with an intermission in there, too. I haven’t seen the cuts yet, and I can’t start learning my lines until I do.
Meanwhile, Gentle Readers can start rearranging their summer schedules to be in Western Connecticut in August.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Connecticut has a Western?
peace
Matt
Hey, congratulations! I hope you will have a lot of fun with the part!
I imagine that it will be easier to develop a distinctive approach to the physical characterization of Alfred P. Doolittle?
Matt,
Certainly it does. If it weren’t for Western Connecticut, Hartford would be in New York.
Chris,
I hope to write extensively on the development of a funny walk. However, I think they’ll have to cut the line about Doolittle’s proper employment being a navvy; I don’t think I can carry off the physique. On the other hand, I expect they’ll also cut the line about how Doolittle dyes his hair to keep employment carrying garbage. We’ll see.
Thanks,
-V.
Well, congratulations on getting a stage daughter, and successfully invoking “The Sting” in the same blog post. Break a leg.