Saturday Night (musical)

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Saturday Night is a 1950s Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, with a book by Julius J. Epstein and Philip Epstein.

Saturday Night was set to premiere in the 1954-55 Broadway season. Announcements of the production appeared in the New York Times, and auditions were held in mid-1955, following some revisions to the music brought about by backers' auditions. In the summer of 1955, it appeared that Saturday Night would be Sondheim's musical debut on Broadway that fall. However, in August of 1955, lead producer Lemuel Ayers died, leaving the production with little morale and even less cash. The production was scrapped, and the musical material shelved. Although a handful of songs from the musical have appeared in revues and on Sondheim compilation albums, the score as a whole went unperformed until 1997.

Sondheim, after seeing a student concert version of the musical at a Stephen Sondheim Study Day at the University of Birmingham, gave permission for the Bridewell Theatre in London to produce the first-ever staging of Saturday Night. Following that production, the show saw its U.S. premiere with Chicago's Pegasus Players, and its New York premiere at the off-Broadway Second Stage Theatre in February 2000. A recording was made with this original New York cast. When asked his reaction to seeing Saturday Night performed in New York after 40 years, Sondheim replied, "I don't have any emotional reaction to Saturday Night at all--except fondness. It's not bad stuff for a 23-year-old. There are some things that embarrass me so much in the lyrics--the missed accents, the obvious jokes. But I decided, Leave it. It's my baby pictures. You don't touch up a baby picture--you're a baby!"^[1]

In 1975, James Benning made a short film Saturday Night based on the musical.