This epic new musical by the award-winning composer/lyricist team Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Once On This Island, Seussical) paints a nostalgic and powerful portrait of life in turn of the century America. Based on E.L. Doctorow’s distinguished novel, Ragtime intertwines three distinct stories that poignantly illustrate history’s timeless contradictions of wealth and poverty, freedom and prejudice, hope and despair, and love and hate. The score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty is just as diverse as the Melting Pot of America that it seeks to recreate. It draws upon traditional Jewish folk sounds to color the haunting music and yearning lyrics of the immigrants, Vaudeville’s outrageous style to capture the spectacle of Evelyn Nesbit, and Joplin and Jazz to invoke the enlivened spirit of Harlem. With a book by Terrance McNally (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Master Class), this 1998 Tony award winning show for best score, book, and orchestrations, features such show stopping songs as “Getting Ready Rag,” “Your Daddy’s Son,” “Wheels of a Dream,” “Till We Reach That Day,” “Back To Before,” and “Make Them Hear You.” This momentous musical is sure to inspire actors and audiences alike!

Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus is partly based on the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, but the play takes a large amount of poetic license and is more focused on entertainment than verifiable fact. At the beginning of the play an elderly Salieri speaks to the audience about his belief that he killed Mozart with poison and then explains his reasons. Salieri was initially impressed by Mozart’s compositions. His excitement about meeting Mozart turned to disappointment when he discovered that Mozart’s behavior and personal life did not have the grace and dignity of his music. Salieri is upset that God would give the gift of the ability to compose beautiful music to someone who lived their life in opposition to Catholic teachings. Salieri renounced God and begins his plot to destroy Mozart. He pretends to be Mozart’s friend while plotting against him. After Mozart’s death Salieri attempts suicide and leaves a note saying that he poisoned Mozart, but he survives and nobody believes his note.

Based on The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, Hello Dolly tells the story of Dolly Gallagher Levi, a matchmaker who has been hired to arrange a marriage for the widowed half-millionaire Horace Vandergelder. Dolly, however, has other plans. She has herself been recently widowed and come to the conclusion that Horace and his fortune will make her the perfect mate. So when she arrives in Yonkers, she immediately begins to plant seeds of doubt in Vandergelder’s mind about Irene Molloy, the pretty young widow she has picked out for him.