'Marry Me a Little' brings Sondheim classics together at Adobe Theater

“Marry Me a Little” gathers songs cut from Stephen Sondheim classics, threading them together in a dialogue-free plot.

The Adobe Theater is staging the show beginning on Friday, July 14.

“Marry Me a Little” is a story of two young New Yorkers who find themselves home alone in their studio apartments one Saturday night. With the exception of a distant piano player, these two lovelorn tenants are left to their own devices to entertain themselves and revisit their past heartbreaks.

Director Gloria Goodman has transposed the musical’s time period to 2020 at the height of the pandemic.

“We were so alone in 2020 and stuck in our apartments,” she said. “I thought it was a way to keep it fresh. They are in the same building. One is on top of the other, but they never meet.”

Conceived by Craig Lucas and Norman René, the revue sets songs cut from Sondheim’s better-known musicals, as well as tunes from his then-unproduced musical “Saturday Night.” Sondheim fans also can hear songs cut from “Company,” “A Little Night Music” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Lucas, an original member of the “Sweeney Todd” cast, overheard Sondheim tell someone about the numbers that had been deleted.

“He got the rights from Stephen Sondheim to use 16 or 17 songs,” Goodman said.

The show premiered off-off-Broadway in 1980.

Goodman updated the piece with a few symbols of the pandemic.

“They come in wearing KN95 masks,” she said. “They’ve got a humongous amount of hand sanitizer and a huge amount of toilet paper.”

Despite knowing of the other’s existence, the pair never get up the courage to talk to each other, although they imagine what such an encounter might be like.

Goodman learned about the musical when she was working as a teaching assistant in the University of New Mexico theater department.

“One of the grad students was wanting to do this show,” she said. “(Sondheim) just passed away recently, so I thought there needs to be a little homage to Stephen Sondheim.”

Sondheim died in 2021.