The 2005-2006 Musicals Tonight! season will feature the songs of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Gus Kahn, Jerome Kern
and Otto Harbach, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and Henderson,
DeSylva and Brown.
The first show presented in the concert series will be Schwartz and Dietz' The Gay Life, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on November 18th, 1961 and starred Barbara Cook. The plot "has determined bachelor Anatol succumbing to the whiles of the enchanting Liesl in the Vienna of 1904." The Gay Life will run from October 18th to 30th.Next, Henderson, DeSylva and Brown's Good News, which "takes us back to the ingenuousness of the 1920s on college campuses
(and on Broadway). Football-mad Tait College's star is flunking
Astronomy until he falls for his tutor," will run from November 1st to 13th. The original production opened on September 6th, 1927 at the 46th Street Theatre.Kern and Harbach's Roberta will run from March 21st to April 2nd, 2006. The show, which "is about a Parisian dress shop inherited by a 'typical' American male,
in 1933, who wisely seeks the assistance of a young woman of style and
allure," opened at the Ambassador Theatre on November 18th, 1933.
Show Girl, with songs by George and Ira Gershwin and Gus Kahn, is a backstage romance that was originally produced by Florenz Ziegfeld when it opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on July 2nd, 1929 with Ruby Keeler and Jimmy Durante. It will run from April 25th to May 7th.Cole Porter's Let's Face It (with a book by Dorothy and Herbert Fields) "has three suspicious wives recruiting three eager soldiers to help make
their philandering husbands take notice;" it runs from May 9th to the 21st. The production opened at the Imperial Theatre on October 29th, 1941, and it starred Danny Kaye and Eve Arden.Musicals Tonight!, whose minimalist concerts are curated by artistic director Mel Miller, consist of piano and singers. The series plays at the 45th Street Theatre, which is located right in the heart of the Big Apple's Theatre District at 354 West 45th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues.
