You Say Potato.(The Talk of the Town)(dialect coach)

"The science of speech. That's my profession. . . . I can place any man within six miles." That's Henry Higgins, in Act I of "Pygmalion," about to transform a lowly flower girl into a proper Edwardian lady. If you are a Manhattan-born starlet making your Broadway debut as said flower girl, he is precisely the sort of man you don't want in your audience. In a play about upwardly mobile speech, the accents have to be right: you don't want to wind up sounding like Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins." And so a real-life Higgins is called for, in this case--the Roundabout's revival of "Pygmalion," soon to open at the American Airlines Theatre--Majella Hurley, an English dialect coach who was brought in to help Claire Danes, as Eliza Doolittle, perfect her "not bloody likely"s and "How do you doooo?"s.

"The whole thing about an accent is that it's physical as well as cerebral," Hurley said last Wednesday, during a post-matinee conversation. "It has to sit within the body." Hurley, who was born in Ireland but sounds like a Londoner, began working with Danes on Eliza's Cockney accent in July. "You've got to be as authentic as you can and true to the period, but you also have to be able to understand what she's saying," Hurley said. "Eliza makes her living selling flowers. She's used to calling out across the cobblestones. You have to make sure it isn't a series of screeches."

Jefferson Mays, who plays Higgins, joined the conversation and offered that one of his biggest hurdles was remembering which syllables to stress: "Logic dictated to me that it would be Kentish Town. But it's Kentish Town." Hurley had suggested he play archival recordings from the period. "She gave me Danny Jones--the real Professor Higgins. Baden-Powell. Prime Minister Asquith. All these wonderful Edwardian voices," he said. Danes, meanwhile, took a more musical approach, singing through her lines and studying recordings of the turn-of-the-century music-hall star Marie Lloyd.

The drawback in using archival material as a guide was that not every old Brit was consistent in his accent. Mays noticed, for example, that Arthur Conan Doyle waffled between "ask" and "ahsk." He said, "Everybody betrays themselves, in a way that Higgins would pick up immediately and say, 'Ah, he comes from Selsey!' " ...