Word: broadway
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...Wonderful Town" is based on "My Sister Eileen," the 1942 hit Broadway comedy about two sisters, intellectual Ruth and blond knockout Eileen, who emigrate from Ohio to a basement flat in Greenwich Village - Ruth looking to be a writer, Eileen with dreams of musical stardom. The musical version, composed by Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Comden and Green, arrived on Broadway in 1953, with Rosalind Russell as Ruth and Edith Adams (later Ernie Kovacs' Edie Adams) as Eileen. The show, which lasted a year, didn't spawn the hits that Bernstein's "On the Town" and "West Side Story...
...pals. They composed the score for "On the Town" in 1944; and in the late 30s, when Comden and Green were starting out in a cabaret quintet called the Revuers, Bernstein occasionally accompanied them on the piano and collaborated on songs. (The troupe also included Judy Tuvim, later the Broadway and movie marvel Judy Holliday.) "Wonderful Town," set in 1935, has many echoes of the team's early days: one scene, "One Hundred Easy Ways (To Lose a Man)," is based on an old Revuers sketch; another set in a nightclub called the Village Vortex, a reference to the Village...
...TAKE THAT WONDERFUL SHOW TO BROADWAY...
...Broadway version by director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall, who also shepherded the 2000 revival, Eileen (now played by Jennifer Westfeldt, the star and co-writer of "Kissing Jessica Stein") is still the gal who gets pawed a lot and doesn't want it, and Ruth (Murphy) is still the big sister who isn't and does. I suspect that, if the show were done 30 or 50 years later, Ruth would be hungrier for women than for men. Even in this meticulous recreation of the 1953 show, there's a slightly lesbic undertone to the crooning and caressing in Ruth...
...show is smartly expanded for the Hirschfeld Theatre without losing its original Encores! feel. Beatty's spare but suggestive sets fly up and down cast in front of the on-stage orchestra (at 24 members, the largest on Broadway). Westfeldt has the requisite innocent allure, and Gregg Edelman, as Ruth's eventual beau, is a cutie with oodles of charm. From the rich supporting cast, I choose Ken Barnett (who plays a tour guide, a magazine staffer, a cop and several other roles) as my star of the future; he's got lots of character personality and the ingratiating comic...