Those Love Letters!

Since The Boys from Syracuse, a 1939 musical based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, it has become increasingly fashionable to set classical drama or comedy to music. The list is long and includes such smash hits as Carousel (Molnar’s Liliom), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet) and My Fair Lady, which everyone knows is Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Now the theater has turned to the personal past of famous authors and actresses themselves. Instead of new plays, excerpts from plays are inserted into revelations of intimate correspondence.

The irresistible story of Shaw’s pursuit of Beatrice Stella Campbell (the Italian-English beauty whose playing of Melisande, Hedda Gabler and Shaw’s own first Liza made her as famous in her day as Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse) is enacted by Brian Aherne and Katharine Cornell in Dear Liar. Jerome Kilty’s adaptation of the posthumously published correspondence of Bernard Shaw and “Mrs. Pat” is a wistfully humorous pas de deux that, in spite of its comic overtones, reveals the hidden drama of unfulfilled love between a man of genius and a woman whose temperament could have engulfed him as a storm a leaf if he had been less of a genius and more of a man. In his own subtle way, Shaw was not altogether unaware of this, as witness his “Shakespeare Sonnet” to Mrs. Pat which concluded with:

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Ernestine Stodelle

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Since The Boys from Syracuse, a 1939 musical based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, it has become increasingly fashionable to set classical drama or comedy to music. The list is long and includes such smash hits as Carousel (Molnar’s Liliom), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet) and My Fair Lady, which everyone knows is Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Now the theater has turned to the personal past of famous authors and actresses themselves. Instead of new plays, excerpts from plays are inserted into revelations of intimate correspondence.

The irresistible story of Shaw’s pursuit of Beatrice Stella Campbell (the Italian-English beauty whose playing of Melisande, Hedda Gabler and Shaw’s own first Liza made her as famous in her day as Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse) is enacted by Brian Aherne and Katharine Cornell in Dear Liar. Jerome Kilty’s adaptation of the posthumously published correspondence of Bernard Shaw and “Mrs. Pat” is a wistfully humorous pas de deux that, in spite of its comic overtones, reveals the hidden drama of unfulfilled love between a man of genius and a woman whose temperament could have engulfed him as a storm a leaf if he had been less of a genius and more of a man. In his own subtle way, Shaw was not altogether unaware of this, as witness his “Shakespeare Sonnet” to Mrs. Pat which concluded with: