Korean Job Discussion Forums

[aka Dave]

My freshman Uni. students have been rehearsing Pygmalion (actually a Pygmalion/My Fair Lady hybrid - they do the musical numbers from My Fair Lady with music from the movie) for like 8 hours a day the last few weeks. I watched a dress rehearsal today and it was quite suprisingly good. They don't nail the accents (of course), but I swear the girl who's playing Eliza sings as well if not better than Audrey Hepburn. The guy playing Henry Higgins is a natural.

They also add some absurdity (and I don't know why) as people who dress in tiger suits and dance around during the musical numbers. I have to help them and I didn't go into exactly why they chose this take but it is funny.

They put so much, I mean so much work into this I felt obligated to post.

Anyway, if you want to see Pygmalion with a Korean accent it will be performed in Cheong-Ju at Seowon Univ. (서 원 Univ.) Oct. 2 at 7 pm. It's free as far as I know and if you're coming out of the big library it's at the building on the left. Our campus is tiny so shouldn't be hard to find.

[Gatsby]

Hey, that's really something to be proud of.

Ummm, you do realize if there is singing in it, it is called "My Fair Lady," don't you.

Pygmalion was the original play by G.B. Shaw, and did not have music.

You can get the movie starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard on DVD here in Korea. The musical didn't change that much of the dialogue.

Either way, to get the kids to this level is a major accomplishment. It is a good sign for the future of Korea.

What, I am wondering, did they make of the morale of the story?

What did they learn from the story, apart from how to pronounce English?

[aka Dave]

I actually proposed they call it My Fair Lady. They balked. I don't know why, really. They have the My Fair Lady music, and more importantly, the ending (where Higgins and Eliza get together), but they worked from the Shaw text and not the script of the movie so I guess that was their thinking.

They've seen both the Leslie Howard Version and My Fair Lady probably dozens of times. The girl who plays Eliza has Audrey Hepburns physical gestures to a tee. And she's not far off on the cockney accent. The guy who plays Higgins is brilliant, but it would take years to get that accent perfect and that's just asking too much.

I really didn't want to have to deal with this as I have to help the head of my dept. edit and revise a paper on meanting negotiation, and that meant wading through a couple academic essays on the topic this afternoon before I went to watch a full dress rehearsal of the play.

It was fun to watch, so if you're in Cheong-ju please come. Their English is so quick and fluent (generally, though with the Korean accent) that I think it will fly over the heads of a Korean audience. That's my main worry with this thing: Koreans might not get it.

Note: the original play was going to be a Shakespeare play. I told them they should do Pygmalion because it's about improving pronciation, syntax, grammar, etc. Something we weyguks are trying to do every day here in Korea with our students .