Happy June! For Broadway openings, it’s not so happy, but we’ve still got a program of songs from a few of the shows that opened in New York in June on this week’s Dress Circle (6/1 7:00 p.m.).
At the turn of the twentieth century, many New York theatres we’re winding down for the summer since they didn’t have air conditioning, so there were fewer openings. Also, beginning in the second year of the Tony Awards (1948), the ceremony was in June, so shows started to try to open later so that they had a chance to be remembered by the Tony voters.
With all of this in mind, we have ten musicals scheduled for this week’s program, and many of them are revivals, but we’re still looking at nearly 100 years of musical history.
Our earliest musical comes from 1912 and is a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.” In fact, if you’re a fan of G&S, we’ve programmed a total of five overtures from their operettas because we tend to not include them in our monthly programs. The other G&S shows are “Iolanthe,” “Patience,” “The Gondoliers,” and “The Mikado.” All of which have been on Broadway between 13 and 33 times!
Our most recent musical is 2011’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” There have only been two other Broadway musical openings since then, but neither of those two shows had cast recordings, so we have to go back 14 years!
We’re planned a song you’ll know from a musical you probably won’t as well as one of the revivals of Bock and Harnick’s “She Loves Me,” the original cast of Kander and Ebb’s “Chicago,” and a studio cast of Friml and Hooker’s “The Vagabond King” to celebrate one if its revivals.
Join us for an hour of good music and a bit of musical history thrown in for good measure.
