All That Chat - re: Are these some of the songs they played for Mary Martin

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re: Are these some of the songs they played for Mary Martin

Posted by:	AlanScott 06:21 pm EDT 05/08/15
In reply to:	re: Are these some of the songs they played for Mary Martin - Michael_Portantiere 03:35 pm EDT 05/07/15

I can quite see Mary Martin as Eliza. I think that if she could have managed the accent work, she could have acted it well. I can understand why a whole bunch of people saw it as a role for her. Dolores Gray is tougher to imagine. But she may have had more range than she generally got to demonstrate. Or perhaps her Eliza in Pygmalion convinced everyone that she didn't. I believe Carol Channing also played Eliza in Pygmalion in a stock tour. I can imagine her being able to do it. Obviously, she could not have played Eliza in the musical we know as My Fair Lady (although it's interesting to listen to No for an Answer and hear that she did have some head voice at her disposal when she was young). Her tour in another Shaw, The Millionairess, seems to have been successful.

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re: Are these some of the songs they played for Mary Martin

Posted by:	Michael_Portantiere 12:03 am EDT 05/09/15
In reply to:	re: Are these some of the songs they played for Mary Martin - AlanScott 06:21 pm EDT 05/08/15

"I can quite see Mary Martin as Eliza. I think that if she could have managed the accent work, she could have acted it well. I can understand why a whole bunch of people saw it as a role for her." Well, I think it's a huge "if" as to whether Martin could have managed the accent work. Also, although we all know she had a soprano range, it was never very convincing to me, and I don't think the role of Eliza would work nearly as well if her songs were in the alto range. Most important of all, although I know Eliza had previously been played by several older women in productions of PYGMALION, I think it's very important to the plot of the play and the musical that she be quite young, and I don't think that would have worked at all with Martin -- even though I know she was always praised for her youthful quality on stage, and no one seems to have strongly objected to her age when she did THE SOUND OF MUSIC :-)

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