After an exhilarating audition process which yielded a wonderfully talented and motivated cast, rehearsals began on March 3.

We have been fortunate to have the services of a truly gifted dialect coach and teacher, to establish the foundation for all the work our actors will be doing in both RP (that’s Received Pronunciation or standard British) and Cockney (working-class British) in our show. And in spite of the somewhat tedious nature of learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then applying that knowledge to the two dialects, our cast has demonstrated uncommon dedication and focus to the task. With their busy lives outside of My Fair Lady, they all managed to do all the homework, and came to rehearsal prepared and with a fine seriousness of purpose. As a lover of language and dialects myself, I took the course, too, and have learned enormous amounts.

Now that we’ve got the building blocks for the speech, we have gone forward into music rehearsals, armed and ready to launch the language while learning this amazing music. This has been a wonderful rehearsal process so far, and we are only in week two of our journey!