York Musical Theatre Company celebrate The Queen's 90th birthday with Happy & Glorious songs through the decades

Running from Wednesday to Saturday, Happy & Glorious celebrates 90 years of musicals from the early musicals of the 1920s, such as Show Boat, right through to shows of the past decade, such as Ghost and Matilda The Musical.

After YMTC's success last October with the wartime show When The Lights Go On Again, the company felt it was important to mark The Queen’s 90th year in an appropriate way, and what better way than through the world of musicals, especially given that songs from Oklahoma! are favourites of The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Devised and directed by Paul Laidlaw, Happy & Glorious looks back to the much-loved musicals of composers such as Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein, covering shows such as Annie Get Your Gun, The King & I, My Fair Lady and The Sound Of Music, and onwards to the modern-day musicals that have filled West End seats, among them Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, Sunset Boulevard, Hairspray and Wicked.

"We'll be looking at some of the lesser known, rarely performed earlier musicals too, like The Physician, Phill The Fluter and Mr Cinders," says Paul, who wants to match the joy of When The Lights Go On Again.

“We received such a wonderful reaction last autumn that we're keen to give next week's audiences the same sense of fun and nostalgia while covering lots of shows that younger audiences will know and enjoy too. There really is something in it for all ages, both for the range of ages in the company performing on stage and for the audience.”

Happy & Glorious will feature Paul Laidlaw playing piano on stage, accompanying a cast of more than 25, including Richard Bainbridge, Jessa Liversidge, Matthew Ainsworth, Kelly Derbyshire, Anna Mitchelson and two groups of York schoolchildren. "The show marks 90 years, but it covers ten decades, so the plan has been to represent music from each of those decades," he says. "It's definitely not been a case of what can we do, but what can we leave out, because the Forties, Fifties and Sixties were so prolific for musical theatre.

"We have only 12 minutes for each decade plus a bit of chat, so there can only be three numbers for each decade. That means I've had to be a bit bloody-minded in what we chose, so ultimately we've sought to have an eclectic programme of the well known and not so well known, with a mix of solos, duets, a big quintet from West Side Story and eight to ten choral numbers to show off our ensemble strength."

Paul and Richard Bainbridge will provide the show's narration. "What we've done is make it something of an audio-visual show with imagery of The Queen from each decade, along with images of the shows, the stars, the programmes, that will guide the audience through the show," he says. "Our narration will draw attention to musical milestones and milestones in The Queen's life, but we'll keep it to a minimum and it won't be a lecture in any way."

Tickets for the 7.30pm shows on April 13 to 15 and 2.30pm matinee on April 16 cost £14, under-16s £11, at thelittleboxoffice.com/ymtc/