This summer we’re presenting two musical adaptations of Shakespearean comedies from the Golden Age of musical comedy, Rodgers & Hart’s 1938 The Boys From Syracuse (A Comedy of Errors) and Cole Porter’s 1948 Kiss Me, Kate (The Taming of The Shrew). It was natural that a musical adaptation of Shakespearean tragedy would arise out of the more serious Broadway tradition that came to its own in the early 1940s with Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, firmly establishing the viability of musicals based on non-comic material.
West Side Story, the brilliant 1957 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein took on Shakespearean tragedy as brilliantly as Rodgers, Hart and Porter had taken on the bard’s comedy a generation earlier, and in a way that wove the timeless story of star-crossed lovers (which Shakespeare himself borrowed from Italian and Latin sources) seamlessly into the fabric of American life and culture. Ken Peplowski and company offer a concert presentation, with vocal and jazz instrumental versions of most of the show's music.