All seems right in the world, at least at City Center’s Encores, when music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell strikes up the 28-piece band and launches into the overture to Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstein’s brass-heavy score—with four trumpets and three trombones—blasts out at you, and when was the last time you heard four trumpets and three trombones emanate from a Broadway orchestra?
The company launches into an energetically staged-rendition of the scene-setting opening number, “Christopher Street”; the leading lady Ruth (Anika Noni Rose) and her sister Eileen (Aisha Jackson) play a comedy scene as naïve newcomers to Greenwich Village, 1935; and the pair launches into “Ohio,” that marvelously tongue-in-cheek, close-harmony paean to the home-they-left-behind: “Why, o why, o why o/ why did I ever leave Ohio?” (Leave it to lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green to tongue-twist the lyric into “Oh why, oh why o/ did I leave Ohio?”)
After which the production runs smack into a wall—more like a pothole—and very little works over the next two hours. Wonderful Town was a major hit in its time, which was 1953, a box office smash in a class with the prior seasons’ Guys & Dolls and The King and I. Like those classics, Wonderful Town was rewarded with eight Tony Awards. While the latter’s success was relatively ephemeral, Wonderful Town is a well-made musical which is reasonably easy to produce effectively. Encores’ 2000 production, staged by Kathleen Marshall and starring Donna Murphy and Laura Benanti, moved to Broadway for a well-deserved year-long run.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The show was a prime example of what was at the time termed an Abbott musical: director George Abbott would craft and mold his shows (including On The Town, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Once Upon a Mattress, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) into fast-paced, tuneful entertainments. The guiding principles were speed, effectiveness, and timing; keep it fast and funny, delete any songs or even sentences of dialogue that allow the pace to dissipate. Abbott was not always able to pull it off, being dependent upon songwriters, stars, and other elements, but the best of the Abbott musicals (as above) worked then and remain durable, even in stock and non-professional productions.
As was the case with the first four City Center productions of Wonderful Town, starring the likes of Nancy Walker, Kaye Ballard, Elaine Stritch, and Donna Murphy. But not, alas, this time. The extended “Conquering New York” dance is ineffectively staged; the star’s bravura solo spot “One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man” is deflated by incorporating eight dancers who steal focus from star and song; and the next scene is scuttled by the severe miscasting of the star’s romantic interest (Javier Muñoz). This is directly followed by a bafflingly-presented rendition of Comden & Green’s satiric “story vignettes.” (The book was written by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, but these vignettes—supposedly drawn from absurd short stories written by the heroine—are more along the line of comedy blackouts and were incorporated over the strenuous objections of Chodorov and Fields.)
By this point, an hour or so into the Encores evening, the battle is lost. Even the four sure-fire musical numbers to come—“Conga!” “Swing,” the Village Vortex Ballet, and “Wrong Note Rag”—barely raise the temperature.
Zhailon Levingston, who made a non-Broadway splash earlier this season with Cats: The Jellicle Ball, does not here demonstrate a facility for musical comedy storytelling. Admittedly, this is something which is best acquired with experience, and the abbreviated rehearsal period of the Encores productions does not allow time to learn or adjust. Choreographer Lorin Latarro starts out strong, in the opening number; but the many subsequent dances seem to retread the same ideas. Especially baffling is the use of two tap dancers, again and again and again—even in numbers which do not call for tap. It almost seems like the budget only allowed one pair of shows each, so it was either tap or stay in the dressing room. (The production credits a separate “tap choreographer,” Ayodele Casel.) We also note the addition of two or three skin color jokes, author uncredited, which do not enhance the entertainment.
The performers seem left to their own devices. Rose (Caroline, or Change) is a fine singer, in a role that requires split-second comic timing but only proficient singing. (Wonderful Town was built to showcase Rosalind Russell, a witheringly funny, non-singing film comedian who was given songs she could talk/sing.) Rose might, with sufficient direction and rehearsal time, be able to carry this musical. Jackson (The Notebook) looks, too, like she was left to her own devices. She sings well—the “Ohio” duet, with Rose and Jackson, is quite a treat—but she has chosen to play Eileen as a man-hungry vamp instead of as a sweetly innocent girl who can’t help it if men fall at her feet. Of the rest, Fergie Philippe (as the quarterback “Wreck”) and Daniel Torres (as Appopolous, the shyster landlord) come off the best.
The root of the problem might stem from the late substitution of Wonderful Town for the previously announced Wild Party. With Encores undergoing an administrative change, it could well be that neither the departing artistic director nor the incoming one were around to carefully select and develop the personnel for this production. Which leaves us with a Wonderful Town which sounds great, at least when Mary-Mitchell Campbell and her brass and woodwinds are bombarding us with the Bernstein melodies and the original orchestrations by Don Walker (and associates).
But Wonderful Town itself, in this rendition, looks old and dated and mirthless. Don’t blame the material.
Wonderful Town opened April 30, 2025, at City Center and runs through May 11. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
