Dear Audience,
I feel the best way to start this director’s note is to tell you something very important that has guided my work on this production since we started working on it last year: I do not like My Fair Lady.
Like many, I felt the show is too long, dated, sexist, and at times kinda boring. I also have never liked the ending - it is just so frustrating. But, because I truly felt that to honor the 50th Anniversary of the musical at Chi Hi - and that as it was our first ever production - it was an important show for us to do.
As I started researching the show, I came across a quote by the playwright George Bernard Shaw who wrote Pygmalion - the play that My Fair Lady is based on. It says: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
This quote became my guiding force throughout our work. I needed to find something to change my mind about this story. What progress has been made since Chi Hi first performed the show 50 years ago? What change still needs to happen so we can continue to achieve the progress we seek?
So I set down the path of trying to figure out what needed to change so our version of this story was relevant to our audience today. First and foremost, I knew I HAD to change the way the ending was handled. I couldn’t change the lines, but I could change how they were said and what the actors did when they said them. I knew what needed to be said for that moment to mean something today and so I made a very risky choice but one I feel is totally necessary. Working backwards from that decision, the rest of the production fell into place and is the version of the story you are watching today.
I am so very grateful to the cast and the production team for taking that risk with me to tell the story in this way. I especially would like to thank the actors in that final scene for doing the hard and honestly scary work that comes with playing the roles in this way. I could not be prouder of the risks they and the rest of the cast have taken to tell this story so that it actually means something. What they have created is a version of this story I more than like, it is one I truly love.
It is our hope that whoever is watching that needs to see the message we have put into this version, feels they can make the changes they need to get the progress they seek.
Thank you for joining us.
Nate Plummer, Director
