‘PYGMALION’: TEA AND PETER O’TOOLE

One can’t say that Peter O’Toole is back on Broadway because O’Toole has never acted on Broadway before. (“Nobody asked me.”) Anyway, he’s there, playing Henry Higgins in a revival of “Pygmalion” that seems to have amused even those critics who couldn’t muster up much respect for it.

Frank Rich of the New York Times felt that everything about the event, from O’Toole’s intermittent boredom to the elegant yet tatty scenery, “defined the West End matinee. This is theater to sip Earl Grey tea by.”

But Rich couldn’t get very upset, even at Amanda Plummer, miscast, in his view, as Eliza Doolittle. The eccentricities, he wrote, were part of the production’s “frayed charm.”

Howard Kissell of the Daily News rather liked Plummer, at least before Eliza turned respectable, and found O’Toole “properly abrasive,” if “rather languid.”

Clive Barnes nodded pleasantly in the Post, and Mary Campbell of the Associated Press thought that O’Toole had “put his own, most satisfactory stamp on Higgins.”

TRAVELER’S ADVISORY: If you’re in Beijing this week, don’t miss “The Music Man” at the Tianguio (Heavenly Bridge) Theatre. It opens Friday, to run in repertory with “The Fantasticks.” The directors are George White of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and B. Rodney Marriott of the Circle Repertory Theatre of New York. It’s the first time American musicals have been sung in Chinese on the mainland.

CLOSER TO HOME: One of the games that some resident theaters play is to announce a dozen appetizing titles for next season--adding, in small print, that this is the field from which the actual season will be selected.

The American Conservatory Theatre--admittedly an offender in the past--has decided to play it straight. Its 1987-88 season, announced this week in San Francisco, will be:

“King Lear,” the West Coast premiere of Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind,” “A Christmas Carol,” Mark Harelik’s “The Immigrant,” Mae West’s “Diamond Lil,” Arthur Kopit’s “End of the World With Syposium to Follow” (also new to the West Coast) and Odets’ “Golden Boy” and Aristophanes’ “The Birds.”

The season will run from mid-October to late May, and will return to the policy of rolling repertory, so that audiences will get a choice of two or even three different titles a week. After a troubled period, ACT seems to be coming back nicely under its new artistic director, Ed Hastings. More information at (415) 771-3880.

BIRTHDAY BOYS: George Abbott will be 100 years old on June 25. While waiting for a new show, he’s staging a revival of his first hit, “Broadway” (1927), for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. Maybe Abbott and Irving Berlin should get together on a project. Berlin turns 99 on May 11.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Lois Potter in the (London) Times Literary Supplement: “Suddenly everyone is editing Shakespeare. Why?”