Variety is the spice of life, and we hope you’ll join us for some on this week’s program.
According to Sara Coleridge, “Hot July brings cooling showers, apricots and gillyflowers." However, for the Dress Circle this week (7-3 7:00 p.m.), it’s bringing 135 years of musical theatre history as we look at shows that opened in New York in July.
Our earliest entry comes from the pen of Michael William Balfe and Alfred Bunn in the form of “The Bohemian Girl” which opened on Broadway in its eighth of fifteen revivals in July of 1884. Our most recent opening took place in July of 2019 and is still going strong, and that’s a stage version of the film “Moulin Rouge” by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce which uses a large number of popular songs by a host of composers.
We’ve programmed songs from a variety of shows that fall between the two.
The big winners for the month are “A Chorus Line,” “Avenue Q,” and “Little Shop of Horrors.” We’ll also hear from revivals of “Cats” and “Guys and Dolls” and the original casts of Irving Berlin’s “This Is the Army” as well as his forgotten “Miss Liberty.”
For good measure, we’ll throw in a song from Stephen Sondheim’s “The Frogs.”
