Remember Pygmalion? It’s My Fair Lady without the Ascot Gavotte. If you share the English-speaking world’s fondness for George Bernard Shaw’s clever and witty version of the mythology, you will admit that his most adored comedy more than holds its own even without Lerner and Loewe’s “loverly” score, and that the cherished classic hold up beautifully even with a healthy dose of cross-dressing-double casting and an unorthodox, if expediently workable staging by the always adventurous Off Broadway Bedlam company. This staging, under the direction of Eric Tucker, attests to the work’s inexhaustible ability to charm. Once my eyes and my preconceived sense of artistic design made peace with John McDermott’s close to thread-bare setting — an arrangement of chairs and a table or two among a collection of noncollectable artifacts— I found myself having a ripping good time. The play begins it romp through the Shavian terrain in the vestibule of the theater where the audience stands among the players and listens to the opening scene that takes place on the street of London's Covent Garden. Soon enough we are ushered into the seating section that is on three sides of the playing area in the Sheen Center where you are as likely as I was, to be smitten by the spunky, cockney Eliza (Vaishnavi Sharma) who speaks with a decidedly South-Asian twist, her self-absorbed mentor Professor Henry Higgins (Eric Tucker), his sportingly supportive associate Colonel Pickering (Nigel Gore) and eventually the irresistibly wily Alfred P. Doolittle (Rajesh Bose). The casting blithely brings to the fore the British colonialism that is alluded to in the original text but often dismissed. And the subsequent surprises that pop up regarding the appearance of others in the play shall not be spoiled by me as they provide laughter where you might not have reason to expect it. Tucker is splendidly disagreeable and opportunistic as Higgins, the insensitive, emotionally remote chauvinist whose heartlessly linguistic instructions are the engine of the plot. The Delhi-born Sharma makes the stunning transformation from flower girl into duchess with a neo-feminist claim while still reminding us she is a chip off Doolittle’s block. Bose brings a craftily debonair quality to Doolittle, while Gore’s Pickering endures by being endearing. The best laughs are earned by Edmund Lewis who portrays Mrs. Higgins as a softly admonishing battleaxe and in the same scene as the unsuitable suitor Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Don’t ask). Be prepared for some chapeau-swapping and a kind of musical chairs in this staging’s most loony moments. Not lost among the more gregarious of Eliza’s play-mates is Annabel Capper as the no-nonsense Mrs. Pearce who doubles in more nonsensical ways as Clara Eynsford-Hill and a parlor maid. Perhaps not the most respectful of Pygmalions you are apt to see in a lifetime, but the Bedlam version is surely making Shaw smile down upon it, even probably against his own will.
