YOUNGSTOWN — The Youngstown Playhouse will expand its Main Stage offerings for its 2023-24 season.

The theater’s 99th season will include three musicals — “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” and “9 to 5” — and the plays “Misery” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”

Not counting Playhouse Youth Theatre and special events, the current season included only the musical “Sister Act” last September and the play “The 39 Steps,” opening in June. The 2022-23 season had four shows in the smaller Moyer Room performance space.

John Cox, president of the Playhouse board of directors, said there are several reasons for the increase.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, “People seem to be showing back up,” Cox said. “The directors we had some interest in all (submitted) bigger shows. We discussed doing ‘Misery’ in the small room, but it’s too small. Ideally, we’d like to have a 150-seat house rather than a 75-seat house. But we don’t want to just do musicals (on the Main Stage). We want to cater to the actors as well.”

“Little Shop,” last staged at the Playhouse in 2001, will open the season on Sept. 22. Written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, the creative team responsible for such Disney animated hits as “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Shop” was a late substitution after the Playhouse couldn’t put together the creative team it wanted for the musical “Once on This Island.”

“I think we’ll do it for the 100th anniversary (in 2024-25),” Cox said. “We’re already planning the 100th season and may have it ready to announce at the beginning of next season.”

A director hasn’t been chosen yet for “Little Shop.”

Christopher Fidram will direct “Misery,” based on the Stephen King bestseller about an obsessed fan who terrorizes her favorite author after rescuing him from an accident. Fidram directed Cox in the stage version of “Misery” years ago at the Oakland Center for the Arts, but his is a newer adaptation with a larger cast and more complex staging.

For December the Playhouse will stage the version of “Cinderella” originally written for television in 1957 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It opened on Broadway in 2013. It will be directed by Emma Wason, who made her Playhouse debut helming “Sister Act.”

“We debated about whether to do a Christmas show or just something family friendly,” Cox said. “There’s enough Christmas stuff out there. We wanted to give families a different option.”

“I thought she (Wason) did a great job last year with ‘Sister Act.’ The people in our shows are volunteers, and we want people leaving here having fun. She did a good job with it, and everyone had a great time during the process, left happy and had glowing remarks about her.”

Randall Brammer will direct the area debut of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” based on the best-selling novel by Mark Haddon about a teenager with autism who starts out investigating the death of a neighborhood dog and ends up uncovering bigger secrets. It will be staged in April 2024 during Autism Awareness Month.

Assuming the third time is the charm, the Main Stage season concludes in May 2024 with the musical “9 to 5,” based on the 1980 film starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton.

The Playhouse originally planned to do the musical in 2018, but it was replaced when the rights to “Mamma Mia” became available. It was rescheduled for 2020, only to be wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic. Connor Bezeredi will direct.

In the Moyer Room, Roz Blystone will direct the John Cariani comedy “Love / Sick,” a collection of nine short plays all set on a Friday night, and Ben Gavitt will direct Norm Foster’s comedy “Here on the Flight Path.” Both are making their Playhouse directing debuts.

“We asked people to turn in shows they wanted to do,” Cox said. “People who are interested in what want they want to do are going to work harder for that project. I like having director-driven pieces.”

The Playhouse Youth Theatre season will feature two productions, “Alice in Wonderland” directed by Emelia Sherin and the student version of “Shrek the Musical” directed by Shiloh Hart. As they did with the upcoming production of the musical “Newsies Jr.” in May, the Playhouse will use some of its educational classes to prepare children for the needs of those productions.

The board is waiting to hear on whether it can get the rights to a third Moyer Room production it would like to do in November, Cox said.

Season ticket / flex pass information will be announced in the coming weeks. The Playhouse will continue the tiered pricing it introduced last season for Main Stage productions.

“When we did (the special event production) ‘Couples Therapy,’ the top tiers sold out first, same with the flex passes,” Cox said, and the additional revenue generated by the higher price for the best seats made a substantial difference in revenues. “People seem to be buying them up.”

Youngstown Playhouse 2023-24 Season

Main Stage

• Sept. 22 — The musical “Little Shop of Horrors”

• Oct. 27 — The drama “Misery”

• Dec. 1 — The musical “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella”

• April 12, 2024 — The drama “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”

• June 7, 2024 — The musical “9 to 5”

Moyer Room

• Feb. 9, 2024 — The comedy “Love / Sick”

• May 10, 2024 — The comedy “Here on the Flight Path”

Youth Theatre

• Jan. 19, 2024 — “Alice in Wonderland”

• March 8, 2024 — The musical “Shrek the Musical Jr.”

Main Stage and Moyer Room productions run for two weekends. Playhouse Youth Theatre shows, performed on the main stage, run for one weekend. Season ticket information will be released soon.