Where's the Sizzle? Playing It Safe With Shaw

If George Bernard Shaw had lived another six years, he most certainly would have turned his poisonous wit on Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. All they did in 1956 was nearly eclipse forever Shaw's celebrated play, "Pygmalion," by turning the story about the professor who makes a lady of a lowlife into "My Fair Lady," one of the most memorable musicals of all time.


Then George Cukor put the final nails in the coffin by making the deservedly award-laden movie of the musical with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. Ever since, Shaw's story without the songs, and without Harrison and Hepburn, somehow seems lacking.


At any rate, those are the kinds of thoughts Galina Volchek will be stirring with a new production of "Pygmalion" at the Sovremennik Theater.


Volchek went the star route, casting the enormously popular actor Valentin Gaft as Professor Henry Higgins, and Yelena Yakovleva as the flower girl Eliza Doolittle. Yakovleva is one of the few young Russian actresses to break into the star ranks recently, doing so mostly thanks to her performance in the 1989 hit movie "Intergirl."


But this pairing, like Volchek's direction, is surprisingly bereft of inspiration and chemistry. "Pygmalion," of course, is less sentimental than "My Fair Lady," and Shaw didn't mess with happy endings, but the Higgins/Doolittle twosome is one of the great theatrical duets. However, Gaft and Yakovleva often play their characters like singers reading different pages of a score.


Yakovleva provides the show's best and worst moments, hitting dead bottom in her galling early scenes as the guttersnipe with the impenetrable Cockney accent. Lacking the opportunity in Russian translation to play with English, she compensates with a bundle of awkward affectations. It's not a bad idea in principle, perhaps, but as Yakovleva snorts, sniffles and grunts with her head scrunched into her shoulders, she looks less like Eliza than Quasimodo from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." It is so irritating that one can only ask what Volchek was up to when the actress was rehearsing her part.


Once free of the need to imitate ignorance, Yakovleva finally can blossom. Especially effective is her first outing in society after perfecting Higgins's beginning lessons in elocution. The actress not only transforms into a beauty, but attains fine comic control. Her glances, pauses and gestures reveal the irony of one who is playing a game well and knows it. Thereafter, she wavers from time to time between excess and monotony, but usually radiates a believable and vulnerable elegance.


Gaft's Higgins is a melange of all the famous Gaft mannerisms. He is arrogant, powerful and brusque, spitting out his lines with machine-gun speed. The problem is that he emanates as much conviction as a gunslinger popping cans off a fence: He never misses, but he's not in any danger, either.


Ultimately, the lack of danger is what deflates this romantic comedy. Imagine a near-kiss scene done so matter-of-factly that the only logical outcome is for the kiss not to be consummated. Well, it happens here twice with the passion meter never registering a blip. When this Eliza finally walks out on this Higgins, the only mystery is, what took her so long?


The supporting cast, led by Valery Shalnykh's soft-natured Pickering, Galina Sokolova's loud Mrs. Higgins, and Valery Khlevinsky's blustery Alfred Higgins, helps fill out the plot.


Even the excellent designer Pavel Kaplevich underachieved. His imaginative costumes in shades of violet are beautiful, but his set is smarter than good. Depicting opposing halves of two moving buildings that never quite come together, it seems little more than an obvious metaphor.


Whether it be Loewe's marvelous melodies or Shaw's syncopated romantic conflicts, this "Pygmalion" leaves you wondering where the music went.


"Pygmalion" plays Jan. 6 and 12 at 7 P.M. at the Sovremennik Theater, 19a Chistoprudny Bulvar. Tel. 921-6473. Running time: 3 hours, 15 mins.