Comparison Of Pygmalion And George Cukor's My Fair Lady

When a director sets the goal of adapting a play to an on-screen experience, a musical film, many aspects of the work already have a visual component to them. Not only do characters have names and general appearances like they would in a book, they also have a set of clear actions that they take throughout the play, specific lines that they say, and distinct mannerisms and tones of voice that can only come out in an off-the-page experience such as a play or movie. For an adaptation to be successful, the overall themes of the works should be the same and the movie should remain true to mid-weighted aspects of the original source. George Cukor’s My Fair Lady shares a practically identical plot with its source material, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. This being said, certain aspects of the overall story are brought to the forefront or hidden through My Fair Lady’s use of song and dance. When the audience examines the small but important differences in the scripts of both works, it is evident that these alterations change the tone of the story from one of a drama
While almost all of the lines were the same, the tones of the two pieces were different. In addition to the lines, the musical had songs that acted as narratives. Unlike Pygmalion, the musical’s characters had the chance in the musical parts to put into words how they were feeling exactly. In the play, a character’s emotions were made known through subtle hints with in the dialogue such as body language or delivery. The choice to add songs to the movie had pros and cons. Though the additional narrative helped clarify how the characters felt, there was also an aspect of complexity that was lost for each of the characters. The audience members of the play had to think about how a character might feel after a verbal interaction instead of having the emotions spoon-fed to them in