With a combination of dancing skills, musical talent and top hats, the Syosset Summer Stock's play, 100 Years of Broadway, was performed to great reviews on Thursday and Friday August 9 and 10.

The show, broken up into five different acts, followed the history of Broadway from its early beginnings to Rogers and Hammerstein through today's contemporary hits. Each act included smatterings of different songs from the era. The seven acts were the Early Years-the music of Tin Pan Alley, which included shows such as Anything Goes and Showboat, Rogers and Hammerstein and their contemporaries which featured the shows Oklahoma and the Sound of Music, the Golden Years which was mainly composed of the traditional Broadway shows such as Peter Pan, Gypsy and Bye Bye Birdie, Breaking New Ground which focused mostly on the work of Andrew Lloyd Weber and, Contemporary Broadway which included the smash hits Les Miesrables, Grease and Annie. Each act was filled with dance and voice solos and was performed by different actors.

The show was produced by the Syosset Summer School Summer Stock Class, which is an enrichment program for residents of the Syosset School District entering grades 6 to 12. This year, 30 children participated and half of them were entering ninth grade or above. The class met three hours a day for six weeks and each day they worked on different aspects of the show.

Kathleen Conklin, director of 100 Years of Broadway, has also been part of seven other Syosset summer stock productions. She said that this cast was wonderful and very easy to work with. Conductor Michael Salzman said his first summer with the Syosset Summer Stock was very enjoyable. "It was a great summer with a fantastic group of students," he said.

"[The play] was a lot of fun. I liked hanging out with my friends and dancing and singing," said Lauren Broderick, a member of the cast for four years in a row who will be entering ninth grade at Kellenberg High School. Azadeh Issapour a soon-to-be seventh grader at H.B. Thompson Middle School and a third-time member of the summer stock cast agreed. "I met new friends and got to act in front of a live audience," said Issapour.

Mary Beth Miller, mother of one of the actors in the play, thought that each child gained something invaluable from summer stock. "It gives them a chance to express themselves in a way they wouldn't normally," she said.