Goodspeed reopening Norma Terris Theatre for two shows in 2023, including a musical based on Dolly Parton songs

Goodspeed Musicals is not only reopening its Norma Terris Theater space in Chester this summer for the first time in over three years, it is reverting to its old practice of doing full productions of musicals-in-progress, with sets, costumes, props, creative lighting and sound design.

The theater company announced Tuesday that two new musicals would be given runs at the 200-seat theater this year.

“Here You Come Again,” playing July 26 through Aug. 27, is a new musical based on songs made famous by Dolly Parton. The Norma Terris Theater is presenting the show in the midst of a five-theater tour which the creators are using as a way to develop it further.

“Here You Come Again” had a three-week run at the Delaware Theatre Company in Wilmington this past fall, was at the Kravis Center in Palm Beach, Florida in December, then played at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in Pennsylvania for two weeks in January.

The musical features two characters: a New York comedian named Kevin who is recovering from a bad breakup by staying at his parents’ house in Texas and a dreamlike vision of Dolly Parton, who emerges from a poster on Kevin’s wall to console and counsel him.

Among the 12 songs in the musical are “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” “Here You Come Again” and the Parton-penned Whitney Houston hit “I Will Always Love You.” The musical is co-written and directed by Norma Terris Theatre veterans. Comic writer Bruce Vilanch, who wrote the book for “Sign of the Times,” a musical based on Petula Clark pop hits that played in Chester in 2016. Tricia Paoluccio, who has been portraying Dolly Parton, was in a 2003 workshop of the musical “Camille Claudel” at the Norma Terris in 2003, and Gabrielle Barre, who directed both “Camille Claudel” and “Sign of the Times,”, is directing “Here You Come Again.”.

“Private Jones” will run Oct. 13 through Nov. 5. The show features music and lyrics by Marshall Pailet and is partly staged with American Sign Language. “Private Jones,” which is based on real historic events, is about a deaf Welsh man who served in the army as a sniper in World War I, hiding his hearing condition from his fellow soldiers. The musical originated when Pailet attended the Johnny Mercer Writers Grove retreat the Goodspeed holds for musical theater creators every winter. The Goodspeed presented a public reading of the show, then titled “Private Gomer,” at its Festival of New Musicals in 2020 and also held a private industry reading of the show in New York last year.

The shows are the first at the Norma Terris Theater since “A Connecticut Christmas Carol” in December 2019. When the Terris space closed temporarily in 2020 due to the COVID shutdown, it was about to launch an entirely new way of presenting shows. For most of its 38-year existence, the Norma Terris Theater has staged full productions of musicals that its creators are still actively working on. The shows are usually at a point where being seen by audiences can get them to the next stage in their development. Theater critics are generally not invited to these works in progress.

In 2020, the Norma Terris Theater unveiled a new program called “The Worklight Series,” where new musicals would be given concert-style readings with actors holding the scripts, rather than full productions that had been designed, staged and memorized. The major change was announced but never happened due to COVID.

One of the three shows announced for the 2020 season, “Johnny and the Devil’s Box,” had a two-week run in a concert version as part of an outdoor summer performance series under a large tent in the Goodspeed Opera House parking lot in 2021. The other two readings planned for that summer, “Bhangin’ It” by Mike Lew, Rehana Lew Mirza and Sam Wilmott and “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County” by horror novelist Stephen King and rock star John Mellencamp, were canceled.

In the time since the theater closed, there were major administrative changes at Goodspeed Musicals. The organization’s executive director Michael Gennaro announced his retirement at the end of 2020. Goodspeed Musicals is now run by the team of artistic director Donna Lynn Hilton (who had been with Goodspeed in a number of different roles since 1988) and managing director David Byrd.

The Norma Terris Theater has been an essential part of new-work development at Goodspeed Musicals for most of the past four decades. Some of the dozens of shows that have been developed there, like the first one ever done there, “Harrigan ‘n’ Hart” by Max Showalter and Michael Stewart, have moved on to the larger Goodspeed Opera House, and from there to other theaters. Some like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn’s “By Jeeves,” based on the comic novels of P.G. Wodehouse or the Elvis biomusical “All Shook Up” went straight to off-Broadway or Broadway runs.

The most recent Norma Terris Theater success was Erica Schmidt’s adaptation of the romantic classic “Cyrano” starring Peter Dinklage and featuring music by The National, which became a feature film.