Before I shut up about Pygmalion, here are a few more things to note for posterity:
Things I am proud of
- Alfie’s accent: I got some compliments and I think it was entertaining to listen to, even if not entirely perfect. I remain a little concerned that some people had difficulty understanding me, which is a problem, but nobody actually expressed that to me, so it remains a guess. But I do think I got it mostly right, the vowels and also the rhythms and the cadences, which are more important.
- The reviews: we got five or six reviews, and they were all glowing. Only two or three of them mentioned me specifically, but nobody said anything bad about me. And the important thing is that good reviews get people to see the show, which leads me to
- The audiences: I didn’t get final numbers, but I think the smallest crowd we had was over sixty, and we were close to selling out two or three times. I think that for the nine paying houses, we sold at least six hundred tickets.
- My Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oos: I love Shaw, as y’all know, but he’s not at all interested in giving Alfie and Eliza Doolittle similar speech patterns or habits, and as a result, all the talk about how she was brought up to this and that are difficult to reconcile with the way they actually talk and act. That doesn’t matter much (this is Shaw, after all), but I had the idea to throw in a couple of unscheduled ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oos. Well, Oahohs; they weren’t as drawn out as Eliza’s. Three of them actually—when Higgins disparages my Welsh heritage and when he says that giving me money would be, morally speaking, a crime, and when Mrs. Higgins says that I can provide for Eliza with my newfound wealth. I came up with them fairly late, and I was happy with them.
- The grime on my hands. It took four dress rehearsals to get it right. My skin is so pale and pasty that the pink would shine through the ordinary makeup. I wound up using face paint cream. A layer of brown that went up to my elbows and on top of that a layer of black that focused on my fingers. The black was then wiped onto my face to complete the Poor Alfie dustman’s look.
- Twice getting a round of applause on my exit (once on my false exit, actually). I love getting a round on my exit; there’s nothing quite so triumphant. I mean, it’s only really done for supporting characters, usually comic ones, but that’s what I like to play, so there it is.
Things I am still dissatisfied about:
- Alfie’s walk. I had a perfectly good walk, a sort of scuttle, that I could do when I was coming on-stage and going off, but I never really adapted it to the middle of the scene. In particular, a lot of my crosses were two or three steps, and I didn’t scuttle them. I generally pride myself on my physical acting, but I never got the walk down properly.
- My lines. I said most of them, in more or less the right order, but I don’t think I ever got the lines word-for-word correct all the way through the show. Nothing disastrous, and I don’t think I ever got anything so backward that I screwed up my fellow actors, but I am supposed to say the words in the script, in the order they are in the script, and that didn’t happen.
- Alfie’s age. I think of Alfie as being forty or so, Eliza being seventeen. Our Eliza wasn’t playing as seventeen (not to carp on her; she wasn’t trying to), and to be honest, I never properly noticed. In fact, I am told that my Alfie came off younger than forty, younger than YHB’s true age, in fact, which make him very much too young. I never attempted to age him, either physically or vocally; I could have done something, at least, toward that.
- There were a couple of jokes that didn’t get the laughs I wanted them to, either because they weren’t actually as funny as I thought they were or because I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. When Higgins asks Rich Alfie Have you found Eliza and he responds Have you lost her? it got a laugh. But when Higgins admits yes and Rich Alfie says You have all the luck, you have it didn’t. I love that line. I tried it fast, I tried it slow, I tried it in the middle. I tried it high-pitched, I tried it low-pitched. I tried it disbelieving, I tried it grousing, I tried it admiring. Nothing. Also, when Rich Alfie complains that I’ll have to learn to speak middle-class language from you, instead of speaking proper English, nobody laughed, but (although I think that’s funny) it didn’t bother me.
- I have to admit that I never liked Whiskers as a fawning, giggling, preening idiot. I preferred my original take on him as a blustering, boasting, contemptuous idiot. I don’t doubt that our Dear Director was right (the audiences seemed to like Whiskers the way I played him), it wasn’t satisfying. I also never really resigned myself to the fatsuit and the crazy wig and beard.
- The time I forgot to switch to my pince-nez and wore my regular glasses as Whiskers. Not that anybody in the audience knew that I was wearing the wrong specs, but that isn’t the point.
- The production blog. I started a production blog for the show, trying to get half-a-dozen people to agree to write a short note a couple of times a week, with the idea that it would keep potential audience types connected to the show. I did get several people who agreed to write notes in theory, but in the event, YHB was the only one who wrote (and cross-posted the notes to this Tohu Bohu; y’all didn’t miss anything).
I am not going through the usual down after a show is over, what we jokingly call post part-’em depression. Mostly because I am going through the angst over my middle-age, which is a different thing. But it was a good experience, and a good time, and a good show, as well. So that’s all right.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.