Stephen Schwartz

We’re spanning 131 years of musical history on this week’s Dress Circle (10/5 7:00 p.m.) as we look at a dozen shows that opened in New York this month from a long forgotten 1894 musical to two revivals opening this year.

We’re revisiting a theme we presented over a decade ago on this week’s Dress Circle (9/21 7:00 p.m.) mainly because there are many new sources from which we can choose.That theme is International Disney, and we’re looking at sixteen selections from a variety of Disney films in fourteen different languages.

We hope you’re enjoying your holiday weekend, and on this week’s Dress Circle (8/31 7:00 p.m.), we’re hoping to add to that enjoyment with “work” songs for Labor Day. The fourteen songs we've programmed include physical work, allegorical work, mental work, and more.

We’re remembering the career of songwriter Charles Strouse on this week’s Dress Circle (7/27 7:00 p.m.) through songs from his stage and screen career. Strouse is probably best known for his work with Lee Adams with whom he penned some of his most successful shows including “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Applause,” and “Golden Boy” although his longest-running musical, “Annie,” was written with Martin Charnin.

With everything going on, we’re looking everywhere we can to find some happiness, and, of course, we turned to the musicals, and on this week’s Dress Circle (7/20 7:00 p.m.), we’ve compiled a playlist of some of the songs that make us happy.

Sometimes, it seems like everything is “for the birds,” so we thought we’d turn to the birds ourselves on this week’s Dress Circle (7/13 7:00 p.m.). Once again, we had a great deal of fun mining our catalogue of musicals to bring you a variety of real, allegorical, and metaphysical birds from musicals like “Bloomer Girl,” “Lost in the Stars,” “Magdalena,” “The Spitfire Grill,” “Lady Be Good,” and “Sweeney Todd” along with several others with which you may or may not be familiar.

Many of us are making our preparations for Thanksgiving, and since the day of family, friends, eating, parades, and football is coming fast upon us, this week’s Dress Circle (11/24 7:00 p.m.) will offer some “turkeys’ for the holiday. Those turkeys are musicals that didn’t run more than ten performances on Broadway, many through no fault of their own.

Shakespeare seems to get credit for a great many things, but this time, he deserves it even if the quote is a bit “off.” We’re “Gilding the Lily” on this week’s Dress Circle (8/15 7:00 p.m.), well, we’ve amassed songs about beauty and its secrets, dressing to impress or excess, and a few make-up tips from a variety of musicals.

One of the reasons we love musicals is that most of them include a variety of musical styles in their scores. For some reason, we decided to look at musicals that include rags of various kinds, and, along with two slow rags called drags, we'll be looking at fourteen songs on this week's program.

This is a program featuring 14 musicals that played between 1 and 12 performances on Broadway, so for a variety of reasons, these could be called turkeys. With that said, we're offering up these musical turkeys for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.