For some reason, we’ve gone back to combining the show openings for July and August on this week’s Dress Circle (8/4 7:00 p.m.) even though we’ve separated them for the past several years.
With that said, we’re looking at eleven shows that opened in New York in either July or August, and we’ll be spanning 153 years of Broadway history. We begin with Michael Balfe’s score to “The Bohemian Girl” from July of 1864, the eighth of its 16 revivals in New York, and end with “Prince of Broadway,” a musical revue based on musicals produced by Hal Prince which appeared in August of 2017.
Oh, did we mention that we’re going to be presenting overtures or preludes to these pieces? We used to do this from time to time because we feel that it truly gives one a sense of the quality of the music in the show. Presenting overtures also made us look back to 2017 for our most recent musical because every show for which we have a cast recording that came after then, didn’t seem to have an overture. We guessed that they just weren’t en vogue any longer.
We are very pleased that the musicals we’ve chosen showcase some of the greatest composers of Broadway musicals. Besides Balfe and the myriad of composers you’ll hear in the incredible overture from “Prince of Broadway,” you’ll hear the work of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne, Frederick Loewe, Frank Loesser, George Gershwin, Charles Strouse, Harry Warren, and Stephen Sondheim.
Join us this Sunday evening for another fabulous mix of music and styles, and see if you can name the fourteen musicals that we heard in that wonderful overture to “Prince of Broadway.”
