Music Theatre Wichita goes for something different to wrap up its 2025 season
After a summer of waitresses, tap-dancing chorines, newsies and sexy Shakespeare, Music Theatre Wichita is wrapping its 2025 season with musical theater royalty.
“It’s a different thing for our audiences to experience,” said MTW artistic director Brian J. Marcum, directing “A Grand Night for Singing,” featuring the music of Rodgers & Hammerstein, this week.
“We’ve been huge with a lot of big numbers and a lot of stuff coming at you from the stage (this year),” he added. “I think this will be a nice way to end the season with all this beautiful music.”
“A Grand Night for Singing” is a revue featuring songs not only from musical theater icons such as “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific,” “Cinderella,” and “The King & I,” but lesser-known shows “Allegro,” “Pipe Dream” and “Me and Juliet.”
Having two dozen songs from R&H musicals will have different meanings for different audiences, Marcum said.
“The lyrics of these Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals are so beautiful,” he said. “Older generations love those musicals, but younger generations, I think, believe they’re just old-fashioned musicals. If you listen to the lyrics of all these songs in the show and these new, beautiful arrangements and these voices singing them, they are all fresh and new and the words are still appropriate and timeless.”
The music was written for five singing performers, with Marcum adding four dancers from this year’s resident ensemble.
“There’s no through-line, and no two people travel together through the show,” he said. “Every song is a different mini-show.”
The singers are Bronson Norris Murphy, whose Broadway resume includes nine years in the Broadway company of “The Phantom of the Opera” and the lead role in the touring production of its sequel, “Love Never Dies”; Jelani Remy, who played Simba in “The Lion King” both on Broadway and on tour; Madison Claire Parks, with more than 400 performances as Luisa in “The Fantasticks” off-Broadway (and the granddaughter of MGM musical star Betty Garrett); Leanne J. Antonio, another veteran of “The Lion King” tour; and Tallulah Nouss, a resident ensemble member and recent graduate of Northwestern University.
The set, designed by Michael Downs with projections by Jordan Slusher, is an outdoors setting, with the first act as more of a garden party and the second act a more formal occasion.
“The audience will be much closer to the action at some points,” Marcum said.
Music director Chuck Koslowske said he was impressed with the arrangements of the songs.
“The vocal writing, especially when it’s ensemble music, is so harmonically rich and the parts are so complex that it’s a joy to put these together,” he said. “When these glorious voices singing them, it’s really fabulous.”
Marcum added, “We’re taking them out of the context of the shows. You can hear these songs on their own merits. It’s exciting to introduce this music to people who wouldn’t go see those shows.”
‘A GRAND NIGHT FOR SINGING’
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, Sept. 3-4; 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Sept. 5-6; 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 6-7 and 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 7
Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas
Tickets: $25-$80, from mtwichita.org, 316-265-3107 or at the Century II box office