The Problem With My Fair Lady's Ending (And How To Fix It)

The tangled history of the ending to George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" and Lerner and Loewe's musical "My Fair Lady". Should Higgins and Eliza get together at the end?

Sources and further reading:

Shaw's recollections of "Pygmalion" rehearsals, including a hilarious anecdote about Tree getting beaned in the face with the slippers which I had to cut for time: https://archive.org/details/herbertbeerbohmt00beer/page/n7/mode/2up

"The Ending of 'Pygmalion': A Structural View", by Stanley J. Solomon: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3204379

The news article about Pascal getting the rights to "Pygmalion": https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/46376704

Alan Jay Lerner on "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady": https://www.jstor.org/stable/40681399

Shaw's original ending for the 1938 "Pygmalion": https://www.jstor.org/stable/40682253

Pygmalion script with postscript: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm

Full, public domain 1938 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmdPj_XbF30
00:00 Intro
01:34 Pygmalion's Metamorphoses
03:18 Shavian Pygmalion
12:26 Pascal's Wager
15:00 What The Americans Did
20:35 What's To Become Of Me?

Видео The Problem With My Fair Lady's Ending (And How To Fix It) канала J. Draper