Word: comically
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...Wilson, is the most fantastic portion of the entire production. With only four players, some of the more upbeat songs become hysterical feasts of scandalous lyrics and perfectly-timed traditional (and not-so-traditional) Broadway dancing. Flanked by melancholy pieces about lost love, the spicier songs add amazing comic relief: the saucy maids and an aggressive adolescent Marvin who sing about making breakfast, the horny high-school girls tempting Marvin at the bus stop and the fabulously raucous number dedicated to Marvin's first gay sexual experience all leave the audience roaring with laughter. Few musicals could line...
...Love-Me Blues" from Follies. His entertaining expressions and adept use of a cane were complemented by Purohit's and Chandler's efforts as his two love interests. Rosenberg and S. David Foley '98 were quite successful in their duets, especially in the comic "Agony" from Into the Woods. Their sweet harmonies belied Sondheim's hilarious wording...
Freundlich invokes the Chekhovian in both his unsentimental depiction of each family member's half-comic, half-pathetic weaknesses and his deliberate avoidance of a cinematically neat closure. Unfortunately, his script falls short of making the characters sufficiently three-dimensional to earn our empathy. We really learn only one or two things about each of them: that Warren's never gotten over his breakup with Daphne; that Jake's still struggling to say "I love you" to Margaret; and that Leigh hasn't outgrown being the baby of the family, though she's found time for an unaccountable but placid...
...rest of the cast, free of the tensions and ambivalence of the two principal characters, do an excellent job presenting the purely comic elements with which Pygmalion abounds. Michael Bradshaw is first-class as that eloquent spokesman for "the undeserving poor," Alfred Doolittle; Eve Johnson cuts a superbly commanding matriarchal figure as the noble Mrs. Higgins; while Alice Duffy strides with majestic aplomb as Mrs. Pearce, Higgins' unflappable housekeeper...
...with its musical offspring, one can't help but recall, a little wistfully, the incomparable inflections of the great Rex Harrison and the riotously funny phonetics lessons (which Shaw either wrote in later or should have written). Nonetheless, the Lyric Stage production does succeed in capturing both the delicious comic shimmer and the essentially problematic nature of Shaw's best-known play...