We’re once again celebrating musicals from the York Theatre Company catalogue on this week’s Dress Circle (7/12 7:00 p.m.) with four of their varied productions. The company has been in existence since 1969, and since 1997 has mostly dedicated itself to musicals, many of them world or American premiers which is an extremely laudable (and daring) thing to do, but their intimate 161 seat theatre is consistently filled.
We’ll be looking at four of their past musicals including Stephen Sondheim’s musical showcasing relationships that don’t develop according to their hopeful beginnings, “Merrily We Roll Along.” We’ll also sample selections from “The People vs. Mona,” a musical murder mystery comedy by Jim Wann, “Little by Little: A Musical About Friendship, Hormones …and Popcorn” by Brad Ross, Ellen Greenfield, and Hal Hackady that explores how the friendship of three people is disrupted by sex. The fourth show is “The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!) by Joanne Bogart and Eric Rockwell that takes a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek look at the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, Herman, Webber, and Kander and Ebb. It adapts recognizable styles of these gentlemen into new works based on the concept of the old melodramas and the conflict surrounding the dialogue, “I can’t pay the rent…” We’ll have a little bit of familiar and a great deal of fun on this week’s program, and we hope you’ll tune in.
