Sweet Charity is a tender, poignant and consistently funny look at the adventures, or rather, misadventures in the ways of love encountered by the gullible and guiless lady known as Charity Agnes Valentine - "the lady of the evening" who always gives her heart, and her earnings, to the wrong man. Charity sings, dances, laughs and cries her way through romances with the "animal magnetism" hero, the "ultra-chic-continental" hero, and lastly, the "impossible-to-believe-but-he's-better-than-nothing" hero.

Sweet Charity is a musical in every sense of the word. Cy Coleman has captured the rhythms and sounds, and Dorothy Fields the vernacular of fun, of 60s New York. It's a dancing show, too, with great opportunity for use of dramatic movement. There's one of the all-time great show-stopping numbers when Charity's dance-hall colleagues sing "Hey, Big Spender!"