Wilton Playshop Will Open 69th Season With Sondheim

WILTON — Wilton Playshop is one of the longest continuously running community theaters in the Northeast. According to an article published in 1968, it is believed to be the 14th oldest community theater in the country. A Wilton cultural icon since 1937, The Wilton Playshop will open its 69th season with the Stephen Sondheim musical Putting It Together, to be directed by George Vollano.

Opening night will be Friday, November 4, with an 8 pm curtain. A post-performance reception will also be offered, sponsored by The Playshop Board of Trustees.

For Putting It Together, Stephen Sondheim has taken many of his most beloved songs, from a career spanning over 40 years, and woven them together in the context of a Manhattan cocktail party. The show opens with “Invocations and Instructions to the Audience” originally written for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but later used in Frogs, and then delights the audience with songs from Sunday in the Park With George, Merrily We Roll Along, …Forum, A Little Night Music, Company, Dick Tracy, Sweeny Todd, Assassins, Follies and Into The Woods.

Unlike Sondheim’s earlier Side By Side By Sondheim (produced at The Playshop during the 1999-2000 season and directed by Mr Vollano), Putting It Together makes little use of the typical Narrator used to tie a typical revue, or in this case “review,” together. Instead, the show uses a wonderful dramatic framework on which the music is hung for all to enjoy.

Putting It Together will continue on weekends until November 26, with Friday and Saturday curtains at 8 pm, and matinees on Sundays, November 13 and 20, at 2 pm.

Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and students. Reservations can be made by calling the box office at 203-762-7629.

For more information visit www.WiltonPlayshop.org.

The Playshop’s 69th season will continue in February with Don Margulies’ Dinner With Friends, to be directed by Rich Mancini. This 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama allows audiences to witness the breakup of a seemingly “perfect” marriage of Beth and Tom, and its effect on the marriage of their friends Gabe and Karen.

The season will then close with Over The River and Through the Woods by Joe DiPietro and directed by Tom Rushen. The play answers the question “What happens when a thirty-something man tells his two sets of grandparents, with whom he has dinner every Sunday night, that he has decided to take a new job and move to Seattle?”

The Playhouse is at 15 Lover’s Lane in Wilton, just off Route 33.