PATRICIA C. SYAK | Symphony notes If it's musicals you love, check out Broadway Series

Three all-time great musicals team up for the 2003-04 Broadway Series sponsored by the Youngstown Symphony Society in conjunction with First Place Bank Community Foundation.
The season begins Sept.ember 29-30 with Cole Porter's "Kiss Me Kate," a saucy, classical tale about theater folk and gangsters, featuring 18 unforgettable Porter tunes.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration, "The Sound of Music," plays for two performances March 29-30.
The season concludes April 26-27 with Broadway's longest-running musical, "Cats."
All performances begin at 8 p.m. Subscriptions to the Broadway Series are available by calling the Symphony Center box office at (330) 744-0264.
'Kiss Me Kate'
The idea for "Kiss Me Kate" began germinating when Saint Subber, the show's producer, worked as a stagehand during a production of "The Taming of the Shrew" and discovered its stars, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, quarreled in private as much as did the characters, Petruchio and Kate, which they portrayed in the play.
With music by Cole Porter and story by husband and wife team Samuel and Bella Spewack, the action in "Kiss Me Kate" takes place during a tryout of the musical version of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." It's a battle of the sexes and a fight to the finish as the characters in Cole Porter's play-within-a-play bicker and romance their way through this timeless story.
"Kiss Me Kate" features such songs as "Another Op'nin,' Another Show," "Why Can't You Behave," "Wunderbar," "So In Love," "Too Darn Hot," "Where Is The Life That Late I Lead," "Always True To You In My Fashion" and "Brush Up On Your Shakespeare," among others.
'The Sound of Music'
"The Sound of Music" playing at Powers Auditorium on March 29-30 was Rodgers and Hammerstein's 35th and final collaboration completed a short time before Hammerstein's death in 1960.
Based on Maria Von Trapp's autobiography The Trapp Family Singers, "The Sound of Music" tells the story of free-spirited postulant Marie Rainer who is hired as governess to the seven children of wealthy autocratic Capt. George Von Trapp. Maria soon wins over the children and the Captain, and you'll be won over by such songs as "Maria," "My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi," "Sixteen Going On Seventeen," "The Lonely Goatherd," "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," "Edelweiss," and the title song.
The delightful and inspiring story of the Trapp Family Singers is a favorite of young and old alike.
'Cats'
America's favorite musical "Cats" completes the Broadway Series on April 26- 27.
One of the most exhilarating and innovative musicals ever staged, "Cats" is stunningly costumed and lushly orchestrated.
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber began setting music to T.S. Eliot's poems in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in 1977. Later, he arranged the music for concerts and still later, he reworked the concept into a dramatic structure which opened in London's West End in 1981.
In a song and dance spectacle, "Cats" bursts onto the stage in a sudden explosion of music and lights revealing a larger-than-life junkyard. Probing car lights tear across the darkened landscape of bottles and boxes, briefly catching the darting image of a running feline announcing the one special night each when the tribe of Jellicle Cats reunites to celebrate who they are.
This is the story of "Cats," the show that revolutionized musical theater.
"Cats" is a memory to last nine lifetimes and is a purrfect introduction to the magic of theater for the whole family.
XPatricia C. Syak is executive director of the Youngstown Symphony Society.