man and superwoman; Jefferson Mays and Claire Danes take on Shaw-and each other-in a smart new Broadway production of Pygmalion, writes Adam Green.(Interview)

Claire Danes may never have seen My Fair Lady, but when she first picked up Pygmalion, the sublimely sharp-tongued, protofeminist Romance in Five Acts by George Bernard Shaw, on which the 1956 musical was based, she had a visceral reaction. "I was making noises as I read it," she says. "Laughing, weeping, snorting-in a pretty aggressive way. The play is just so smart and taut and tense and moving. And it's such a classic premise-everybody loves a good makeover story."

This month, the 28-year-old actress gives herself a makeover of sorts, as she makes her Broadway debut in the first major New York revival of Shaw's classic in 20 years. Under David Grindley's direction, Jefferson Mays, who won a 2004 Tony for his remarkable performance in I Am My Own Wife, plays the irascible professor of phonetics and confirmed bachelor Henry Higgins. Danes is Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl whom he teaches to speak proper En_glish and tries to pass off as a lady-only he doesn't know how to handle her once he's succeeded. "Women upset everything," Higgins says to his colleague Colonel Pickering. "When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another."

Audiences who, unlike Danes, grew up on My Fair Lady, with its brilliant Lerner and Loewe score and iconic performance by Rex Harrison, will recognize the mongoose-and-cobra battles between Higgins and Eliza-he calls her "presumptuous insect"; she throws a pair of slippers at his head. But missing from Shaw's 1912 original are the musical's decidedly un-Shavian happy ending and most of the familiar set pieces, including Eliza's triumphant debut at Ascot. "What you get in return are these very intimate, very potent duets and trios that more than make up for it," says Grindley, who brought immediacy and vigor to last season's Tony-winning revival of R.C. Sherriff's 1928 World War I drama Journey's End.

By reenlisting Mays, who played an army cook in that production, Grindley has foregone a plummy-voiced marquee name (Peter O'Toole was Broadway's last Higgins) in favor of an idiosyncratic character actor. "Jefferson won't shy away from playing the more brutal aspects of the role," he says. "He'll be comfortable playing the ambivalence, without winking at the audience to assure them that he's really just a lovable rogue."

Mays ...