The fall musical this season at Illinois Wesleyan's School of Theatre Arts harkens back to the 1930s with the classic Rogers and Hart show, The Boys from Syracuse.
The show's plot borrows from yet another classic theater piece, Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors about two sets of twins and mistaken identities.
Many of today's theater students grew up in an area of pop and rock Broadway musicals, like Rent, or the so-called "Juke Box" musicals that string together pop songs around a loose plot, said Wesleyan's associate theater professor Scott Susong.
Susong said he wants students to know and appreciate shows from what is described as the "golden era" and "pre-golden era" of musicals, dating from the 1920s to the 1060s.
The Boys from Syracuse contains classic Rogers and Hart songs including, "Falling in Love with Love," "Sing for Your Supper" and "This Can't Be Love." They're songs Wesleyan's young performers may have never heard before, let alone sung," Susong said.
"I;m always worried, but they really love it," Susong said in an interview on GLT's "Sound Ideas.
"They get a lot of contemporary material. It's more rearified for us to do these throwback shows," he added.
Susong said it's a chance for the musical theater students to stretch. "We're training these kids for Broadway. They have to be commercial singers, they have to be able to sing almost operatically as well as sing pop, rock and even country."
Richard Rogers' sophisticated melodies and Lorenz Hart's clever lyrics prove a big draw with the students.
"They get to tackle these tight harmonies that are very Andrew Sistersesque," Susong said. "When they see these internal and external rhymes and forced rhymes, they love it."
The Boys from Syracuse is on stage at the Jerome Mirza Theatre at Wesleyan's McPherson hall Nov. 15 to 20.