Past: Since its founding in 1989, Signature has earned a reputation as the area’s preeminent producer of musical theater — most notably the works of Stephen Sondheim — after originally operating out of a refurbished auto garage for more than a decade. In 2007, the company moved into a sleek Shirlington home, boasting a pair of black-box theaters with flexible seating arrangements (255 to 330 seats in the larger, and 99 to 124 in the smaller), and won the Tony for regional theater in 2009.

Future: Signature opened its current season with an intimate reimagining of Jason Robert Brown’s “The Bridges of Madison County” and this winter will host the world premiere of “Private Jones,” a musical inspired by a deaf Welsh sniper in World War I. And Gardiner is set to direct a pair of revivals: “Ragtime” in the theater’s traditional holiday slot, from late October into January, and a spring production of “Hair.”

What people love: “If you’re a fan of Sondheim, no one does his work better than Signature. As a fellow theater with a distinct house dramatist, it’s always exciting to see which of his pieces they choose each season and the work they find to supplement it.” — Simon Godwin, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre