You’re the drama director at an all-boys’ school who’s looking for a musical that requires far more young men than young women. Oh, a show with a few female roles is fine, for you can borrow bodies from a nearby all-girls’ school. But still, there aren’t many shows that meet your requirements. After all, you can only present 1776 every so often (although every school should do 1776 as often as possible).

Actually, there’s another splendid musical mostly populated with boys (eleven of them) and with very few girls (a mere four). Better still, it’s a more age-appropriate show for boys’ schools than one that requires a thirtyish Thomas Jefferson, a fortyish John Adams, a fiftyish Roger Sherman, a sixtyish Stephen Hopkins and a seventyish Benjamin Franklin.

It’s Saturday Night. Truth to tell, the younger the cast, the better, for the Stephen Sondheim-Julius J. Epstein musical asks its audience to condone the (anti?) hero’s many mistakes, and the younger the trespasser, the easier the mistakes are to forgive.

Saturday Night was Sondheim’s first professionally optioned musical, which he and Epstein wrote in the early ‘50s. Alas, it lay dormant until 1997, when the powers-that-be at the Bridewell Theatre in London beseeched Sondheim to let them be the first to produce it.

Epstein (one of the writers on Casablanca) had long since died, leaving Sondheim to re-examine Saturday Night, make a few changes and proclaim that he now regarded this early effort as “baby pictures.” Fine, but some baby pictures are taken by Annie Leibovitz while others are 88-cent K-Mart specials. Saturday Night has an excellent score and a book with richly drawn characters.

Yes, the show has more of a fairy-tale ending than Into The Woods, for justice isn't quite served; in fact, it blindly looks the other way. Still, the crowds who are cheering the current Musicals in Mufti presentation at The York Theatre Company seem grateful for the happy ending.

The curtain rises on Brooklyn buddies Ted, Artie, Ray and Dino. They often put their arms around each other buddy-buddy, which allows the lad on whom the unexpected arm rests to show an attitude of embarrassment, tolerance or even mock-femininity.

Real femininity is what they all want to make this Saturday night in 1929 extra-special. The young men whom you cast – as well as the ones you have in your audience -- will relate. What guy on a date hasn’t sweated free-flowing rivulets while worrying if he has enough money to last the night?

Gene, however, wants substantially more, as we can tell when he enters in top hat and tails. Although he stresses that he’s looking for “Class,” his cronies urge him to “Be yourself, Gene.”

Actually, Gene believes that he’s doing just that. Sondheim had Gene learn that the so-called best people say “tumbler” rather than “glass” long before “Paul Poitier” in Six Degrees of Separation discovered it.

This social-climbing occurs because Gene's not proud of his genes; his father merely sells women's underwear. What keeps us from hating him is his plaintive and resolute “I want to be what I can.” (Ben Fankhauser at the York superbly manages to make his quest seem noble – as if everyone must strive for more self-actualization no matter what the cost.)

Gene tries to bluff his way into a swank party. Once again, your audience will sympathize. How many have wished they’d gone heavier on the deodorant while waiting to see if they’d be granted admission to the current white-hot night spot? Parents (or even grandparents) will remember their own agonies of facing a sternly unsympathetic guard in front of Studio 54 in the ‘70s.

Like that club, the place that Gene wants to crash is in Manhattan. While the Gene of today might well brag about living in hot ‘n’ trendy Brooklyn, back then the borough was Manhattan’s unloved stepchild. So once Gene meets Helene -- a Southern belle from a marvelous and wealthy family – he overcompensates by bragging about his car.

But it’s not his. The Pierce-Arrow belongs to his cousin, who asked Gene to keep an eye on it while he’s in Florida. Gene instead chose to keep his hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas pedal en route to Manhattan.

Helene (the enchanting Margo Seibert) matches his stories with a few fanciful ones of her own. Your eyes must be glazing over at a plot where two phonies don’t discover the truth about each other until the show’s final moments. No – Epstein wisely had Helene immediately wise up, for Gene had inadvertently left his driver’s license with her. That allows Helene to learn his real address and show up at his less-than-impressive Brooklyn house.

However, Helene hasn’t just tracked him down to unmask him; she wants to take the opportunity to admit that she too was, to use an expression of the era, "putting on the dog." She owns up to being Helen Fogel whose father markets chickens to wholesalers.

That makes her less of a phony, but Gene has miles to go before he learns that the truth will set him free. He dreams of the time when he’s so rich and famous (and therefore happy, too); expert director Stafford Arima has one lackey bring a glass to Gene’s lips and another turn the page on the book he’s reading.

Gene’s low-level job on Wall Street allows him to hear that Montana Chemical will soar as high as an elephant’s forehead. He collects substantial sums from his buddies on a line that, at Sunday’s opening, made the York audience laugh heartily: "Name me a stock that's going down."

Well, in fact, Montana Chem. But the guys have already lost every penny, because Gene didn’t buy the stock. He spends their money when he goes window-shopping for more than just windows – to wit, an entire swank apartment on Sutton Place. When he sees “that look of well-bred contempt" from the real estate agent who sees through him as if he were one of those expensive windows, Gene must save face by giving him the money as a deposit. Oh, what a tangled web he weaves, first borrowing cash on the Pierce-Arrow and then selling it outright.

Despite Gene’s not being on the up-and-up, we’re still rooting for the (literally) poor kid although the rich kid is in the right -- because the cousin commits the crime of being condescending to the neighborhood workadays. Gene’s cousin harkens back to shows of yore, where the socially inept wealthy scion was easy prey for the street-smart.

That girls grow up faster than boys has often been alleged, and Saturday Night validates this by having Helen soon give up her pretensions. Gene won’t until this woman behind the man pushes him to take a forward step.

Direct your young cast to pronounce each “a” very broadly to replicate Brooklyn street accents. At the York, Mildred (the amusing Dana Steingold) sounds as if she's a person who's developed a cold.

While auditioning for Dinos – who constantly plays piano -- ask if any actually can tickle the ivories. While you could finesse by having your Dino mime-play while your musical director takes over (as Mark Mitchell did here), having an actual pianist play is more fun. However, if you get a would-be Dino as talented as York’s non-pianist Jeremy Greenbaum, grab him.

For this staged reading, Darrel Maloney provided projections for the back wall, ranging from movie posters of Rudolph Valentino in Son of the Sheik to a front porch in Flatbush (which is, incidentally, the actual name of the unproduced play that Epstein wrote with his brother Philip before Sondheim came on the scene).

Saturday Night is easily one of Sondheim’s warmest scores. It also shows him sowing seeds that would grow in future shows. One line in “What More Do I Need?” – “You say you love me” – would show up in Follies, albeit in the past tense – fitting for a musical that’s much about the past. That same song’s city-laden imagery makes it a precursor to the “Who Wants to Live in New York?” sequence in Merrily We Roll Along. That all of Gene’s friends want to help him out of his sticky situation stresses that “No one is alone.” (Greg Kamp is wonderfully amusing as a law student who enjoys showing off what’s he’s learned.)

How successful is the York presentation? Late in Act Two when a nightclub singer delivered the line in which she asked the fourth-wall audience “Are you having a good time?” the first-nighters seized the opportunity to roar back a definitive "Yes!" The question, by the way, was asked by “Female Vocalist” (the always reliable Kenita Miller) who got to sing all of a dozen lines before she was interrupted. No, Saturday Night won’t tax the young women in your cast, but do get the right young men on that front porch in Flatbush.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com and each Friday at www.kritzerland.com. His new book, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks – a Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award is now available at www.amazon.com.