Eliza? - My Fair Lady Revival 2018 — Page 41

Thanks for that much-needed laugh, Director. Paging LCT?

schubox said: "All the discussion on PoC casting just made me realize how much I want Idris Elba to play Higgins"

There is no need for Higgins to be that sexy.

Kad said: "givesmevoice said: "schubox said: "All the discussion on PoC casting just made me realize how much I want Idris Elba to play Higgins"

There is no need for Higgins to be that sexy."

He can put his marbles in my mouth any day."

I believe that would be more appropriate for My Bare Lady. Unless someone can think of a better pornographic title.

A great many bww posters seem to be unhappy with this cast because it fails to mirror the show already screening in "trailers" playing in their musical theatre heads. It's WTF wrong because it utterly fails to replicate their preconceptions.
While a great many others, myself included, are thrilled with this casting precisely because it does not replicate our entrenched preconceptions but simply invites tremendous curiosity and inspires our imaginations.
However, a few posts seem to suggest, wrongly I trust, that their authors have no imaginations to either mirror or inspire.

Updated On: 10/6/17 at 10:54 AM

Granted, this is from 10 minutes of Googling so it's hardly the most ironclad research...

"

“A lot of aristocratic families have stories of African or Indian ancestors in the family,” says Eade.

The author William Dalrymple, for example, is the fourth son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet, whose family are kinsmen of the Earls of Stair and Scottish aristocrats. While researching his book, White Mughals, Dalrymple discovered that his ancestors had taken Indian brides during the Raj.

After he found “the story of a Muslim princess with the somewhat unexpected name of Mooti Begum Dalrymple”, he unearthed a direct Indian ancestor. And of our blue-bloods, he is certainly not alone. The wills of East India Company officials show that in the 1780s, one third were leaving their goods to Indian wives and their Anglo-Indian children."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/familyhistory/9975930/Britains-blue-blood-has-been-mixed-for-centuries.html

Of course, I take your point that race would have an effect on how the character was perceived and the circles in which they could move.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/26/family-secrets-deborah-cohen-review

http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.com/2010/08/tragic-tales-samuel-coleridge-taylor.html

Eliza and Freddy are probably out unless the production actually cared about such color conscious casting. But what about Pickering and Zoltan? I know less about the military than I do about the Edwardian Era but is colonel such a high rank that racism would have impeded his ability to rise to that post? And it would add an additional layer to his kindness to Eliza. Zoltan is already a foreigner. It's Hungary so you could probably hire someone of Iranian or Turkish descent. Or someone who could pass for Romany.

Thanks for the information. There was an incredibly soapy and average British drama called Indian Summer where they discussed how white British men took Indian brides, though there was still a stigma attached, but how the opposite was almost never true (Indian man taking a British wife) because it simply wasn't acceptable. Idea of white women needing to be preserved and all that junk.

Hadden-Paton looks far older at 36 than Ambrose looks at 40.

I guess they'll have to rewrite the expository scene in which every character says their age.

Updated On: 10/6/17 at 02:37 PM

GeorgeandDot said: "I was lurking on Twitter and Facebook and as a black woman, I find it so strange that the only people "outraged" over the lack of diversity in this casting are white people. I'm sure there's some whole reason for that, that I'm missing, but I just find it interesting. Almost like they feel like they need to be "outraged" for us a la Rafael Casal in the Comet scandal. Just interesting to me."

Well, because theater can be somewhat exclusionary and uninterested in telling the stories of POC, POC end up making up a smaller proportion of theater fans. But also it's My Fair Lady so I don't think a lot of sensible people were expecting out of the box casting from Bart Sher.

I agree, I love to see diversity and I think Broadway has made great advances in creating more diverse shows and roles, but there's no reason to get upset for us everytime a cast is announced. We've got bigger fish to fry these days.

It's not like they cast Emma Stone as Ti Moune.

So, anyone up for a game of “who’s Freddy”? Matthew James Thomas popped up in my thoughts today.

ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "Going back to people being unsure about Ambrose, I really do wish there was a clip or something out there with her singing a song in the style of what we will be expecting from Eliza Doolittle. There are clips of her singing some torch songs and what-not, but nothing like what Lerner/Lowe wrote here. I think if people could imagine how she'll sing the songs, then maybe some of the apprehension will fade a bit...or maybe not depending on the product. Her renditions of the songshas to be better than Martine McCutcheon, right?"

Scotty, I think you are right that many have those apprehensions. But I have none.

Partly because I think Ambrose is extremely talented. Partly because her rendition of You Light Up My Life - not that that there isn't a lot of daylight betwween that song and I Could Have Danced All Night - in a fantasy sequence on Six Feet Under convinced me that Ambrose is an extraordinary vocal talent in the general Broadway vocals style and tradition (the rest of her singing available online is great but hip/lounge-y).

But mostly because Sher has faith in her. That gives me a high degree of confidence in Ambrose's vocal rightness for Eliza.

That it remains a challenge to envision exactly what she will do vocally with Eliza, only makes the anticipation of this revival all the more intoxicating.

Updated On: 10/6/17 at 07:46 PM

Max Von Essen would be super.