How Do <em>Carousel </em>and <em>My Fair Lady </em>Fare in 2018?

“My ending makes money,” Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the original Henry Higgins, wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1914 after the 100th performance of the first London run of Pygmalion. “You ought to be grateful.” Shaw had deliberately not injected romance into his rewriting of the Pygmalion–Galatea myth, which ends with the statue come to life marrying her sculptor. Tree started a century of “corrections” by having a lovelorn Higgins throw bouquets at his pupil Eliza as the curtain came down. “Your ending is damnable,” Shaw wrote back. “You ought to be shot.”

The endings of both My Fair Lady, the 1956 musical version of Pygmalion, and Carousel, the 1945 musical version of the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play Liliom, have been problematic from the start. Audiences want one thing, the original playwrights another—and, in both cases, the adapters something else. The question of who should get which wishes satisfied is still unanswered, and in an era in which abuse and disrespect of women are everywhere discussed, audiences today are likely to leave both theaters as dissatisfied as they have ever been.

The problematic endings might help explain why the current revivals of both shows—each the work of teams jam-packed with artists high on anyone’s A-list—came away with startlingly few Tony awards in June, despite multiple nominations. In a complete surprise, the revival of Once on This Island, a 1990 musical whose current production celebrates love that crosses class and race barriers, won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.

Certainly, both shows are worth seeing—and, particularly, hearing. has a complement of 29 in the orchestra, has been sumptuously, meticulously reorchestrated by Jonathan Tunick, the original orchestrator of many of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals; the musical supervisor is Andy Einhorn, who has deep experience in conducting classics of the musical theater.