Two of Rodgers and Hart's most famous musicals come to The Dome at the weekend to mark the centenary of the birth of Richard Rodgers.

Julia McKenzie, replacing the previously-billed Honor Blackman, narrates and the cast includes Kim Criswell, Bonnie Langford and Tim Flavin, who now lives in Brighton, in two concert performances given by the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Robert Ziegler.

Rodgers and Hart, 17 and 24 respectively when they first met, collaborated for more than ten years producing musical after musical between the wars and wrote some of the most famous of American popular songs ever penned.

Lorenz Hart was the wordsmith full of wit, sentiment and charm while Rodgers composed the music, full of lilting melody.

Together, they launched the Golden Age of the Broadway musical and paved the way for Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Ziegler was born in the US and grew up with Rodgers and Hart and many other songwriters constantly on the record player.

He said: "Without these two, along with the Gershwins and others, there would be no Sondheim or Lloyd Webber shows.

"They broke the mould of the old-fashioned musical and found subjects that had never been done before.

"On Your Toes is all about gangsters and Pal Joey has a pretty nasty central character who juggles the affections of a wealthy society woman with that of a naive chorus girl.

"Without these groundbreaking stories, I doubt whether Sondheim would have got away with a musical about a London murderer or Lloyd Webber with a show about a South-American dictator's wife.

"And the songs are spectacular. Everyone knows them, especially If I Could Write A Book, Slaughter On Tenth Avenue, Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered, There's A Small Hotel and so on.

"They are all-American classics but few people now know the songs in the context of the shows they come from.

"This is one of the reasons we are doing this concert arrangement.

"We want people to hear the great shows that don't often get revived. We want to do many more of them."

Julia McKenzie is a long-time associate of Sondheim and an award-winning musical star. She has worked as narrator with the BBC Concert Orchestra before in Leonard Bernstein's On The Town.

Kim Criswell is a noted Broadway star whose numerous credits include Annie Get Your Gun, The Threepenny Opera and Anything Goes.

Her crystal-clear soprano voice shifts effortlessly from operetta to sounding like Ethel Merman.

For tickets, call 01273 709709.