Irving — On Saturday night, at the opening of the new musical Blue Roses at Lyric Stage, Founding Producer Steven Jones announced the organization's 2014-'15 season. It's been interesting to see how these seasons develop ever since Lyric did its first revival of a classic with a full orchestra and original orchestrations, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, back in 2007.

The mission has definitely been to present the warhorses and the lesser-known classics in the way they were originally performed on Broadway, while new works—which is what Lyric built its reputation on in its first 15 years or so—have taken a backseat (Blue Roses, based on The Glass Menagerie, notwithstanding). Usually, one of the lesser-known ones gets the full-orchestra treatment or maybe a full-orchestra concert version.

Next season is interesting in that the concert staging goes to one of the biggest names in the musical theater canon: Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun. ("Not a great book, but filled with hit songs," Jones says.) That's in the middle of a season that's bookended with full productions of two other mammoths: Fiddler on the Roof and South Pacific, which will be the last of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Big Five to receive the full treatment from Lyric. (After Carousel came The King and I, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music in subsequent seasons.)

Most exciting about the new season is that two beloved works that are hardly ever revived will have big productions with full orchestras: The Golden Apple (1954) by Jerome Moross and John Treville Latouch, which retells parts of Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey; and Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark (1941), which centers on a fashion magazine editor and deals with psychoanalysis.

All five shows will be in the Irving Arts Center's Carpenter Hall.

The line-up and dates are:

Fiddler on the Roof, Sept. 5-14, 2014

The Golden Apple, Oct. 24-Nov. 2, 2014

Annie Get Your Gun in Concert, Jan. 22-25, 2015

Lady in the Dark, April 24-May 3, 2015

South Pacific, June 12-21, 2015 

To order season subscriptions, call 972-252-2787 or visit www.lyricstage.org.