The theme of the 2024-25 season at the Milburn Stone Theatre at Cecil College is “Dream Big,” which functions as an homage to the “want song,” an important element of musical theater.

Want songs, also known as “wish songs,” allow characters to sing about their dreams and desires.

“As theater makers, we all dream about what shows might be like and what things will be like for the future,” said Andrew John Mitchell, Milburn Stone’s artistic director. “So we’re dreamers as much as the characters and the themes of our shows.”

The season features six musicals and two straight plays. It starts in August with “Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville” and ends in June 2025 with “Once.” In between: “Ride the Cyclone the Musical,” “The Crucible,” “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” “Hamlet,” “Oklahoma!” and “Anastasia the Musical.” “Not all of the shows center around dreams,” said Mitchell, who’s scheduled to direct “Oklahoma!” and “Once.” “But a good amount do.”

The theater will also host other events, including its annual Cecil Country Independent Film Festival, Celtic Festival and Susquehanna Bluegrass Festival, plus the return of Dame Edna.

Details and tickets are available at www.milburnstone.com.

That was then, this is now

Mitchell said that he has witnessed huge changes since 2012, when he started working at Milburn Stone. “We’re a very different organization,” he said, noting changes in funding, attendance and numbers of productions.

In 2014 and for a few years, they also did shows at Elkton Station, totaling more than a dozen shows in a season, but they concluded it overtaxed staff and volunteers. “At times, we did almost too much theater,” he said. That’s why the 2023-24 season has nine shows, and the 2024-25 season has eight.

“Escape to Margaritaville,” which runs Aug. 9-18, is a 2017 jukebox musical featuring the feel-good songs of Jimmy Buffett and a book by Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley. “ ‘Margaritaville’ is literally a dream of getting away to an island adventure and dreams of making it big,” Mitchell said.

“Ride the Cyclone,” which runs Sept. 20-22, is a 2015 musical by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell. The show focuses on six teens killed when their carnival ride malfunctioned, and they are asked to justify (through song, of course) being retuned to life. “They’re stuck in limbo and dream of their life again,” he said.

“This delightfully weird and just plain delightful show … will provide the kind of thrills we look for in all musical comedies, however outlandish their subject matter: an engaging and varied score … and a supremely witty book,” New York Times critic Christopher Isherwood wrote.

Perchance to dream

“The Crucible,” which runs Oct. 18-27, is the 1953 Arthur Miller classic drama that on one level is about the Salem witch trials of the 1690s and on another is about the Red Scare of outing alleged communists in the 1950s.

“The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties,” Miller wrote in The New Yorker in 1996. “The old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on.”

“The Crucible” is the kind of show that’s studied in schools, and Mitchell said that gives Milburn Stone the chance to add a school-day performance for students.

“Beauty and the Beast,” which runs Dec. 6-15, is adapted by Linda Woolverton from the 1991 movie, which is based on a French fairytale published in 1740. The movie featured songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and Tim Rice was brought in to write lyrics for new songs in the 1994 stage adaptation.

In “Belle,” Belle and Gaston get more than 5 minutes – enough time for two songs in many shows – to reveal how they dream that “there must be more than this provincial life.”

“Hamlet,” which runs Jan. 24-26, is the William Shakespeare tragedy from the early 1600s about the melancholic and doomed prince of Denmark. His famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy a few lines later dreams about death: “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

“Hamlet” is also studied in schools.

A groundbreaking dream ballet

“Oklahoma!,” which runs Feb. 21-March 2, is the groundbreaking 1943 musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, based on a 1931 Lynn Riggs play about a farm girl and her two suitors.

The show was famous for integrating songs into the plot and the 15-minute dream ballet in which the heroine contemplates her future.

“Anastasia,” which runs April 4-13, is a 2016 musical by Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens. It’s based on a 1997 animated film, which is in turn loosely based on the true story of women who claimed to have escaped the execution of the Russian royal family and to be the legal heir to the Romanov fortune. The fictionalized musical follows two con men who train a street sweeper – who shares her post-amnesia recollections in a song titled “In My Dreams” – to be Princess Anastasia.

“Once,” which runs June 13-22, is a 2012 musical by Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová and Enda Walsh, which is based on a 2007 film. Hansard and Irglová won an Oscar for their song “Falling Slowly.” “Once is about the dream of making it big, of having a career in music,” Mitchell said.

The “dream” through-line continues in one more way. In 2025, Milburn Stone expects to launch a capital campaign to refurbish its house, where the audience sits.

The building opened in 1992, and over the years they have added space for patrons who have mobility issues or use wheelchairs. The have also removed the first two rows of seats in the house, which were too close and at the wrong angle to enjoy shows. And they avoid selling seats in the first row of the balcony, where the view might be blocked by the railing. Those moves have cut about 10% of the seats, bringing capacity to 408.

“That’s our dream to really make sure we have a theater for the next 30 years,” Mitchell said.