Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wonderful Town, the price is not too high to pay. Although its plot is formulaic and its ending pat, the Loeb's latest offering boasts a melodic Leonard Bernstein score, an occasionally witty book and, most importantly, the comic and musical talents of Rhonda Lee Goldenberg and Susan Terry, who look and sound just right as the two sisters...
Less impressive are the Adolph Green and Betty Comden Iyrics, which are more often predictable than clever. The two lyricists do sometimes scale the heights of wit, as in Ruth's comic lament "A Sure Way to Lose a Man (One Hundred Easy Ways)" in which she sings...
WHAT LIFTS this production above the level of mere respectability, however, are the deft performances of Terry and Goldenberg in the main roles. Terry plays Ruth--the dumpy, in tellectual brunette--with zest and comic flair, displaying the versatility of a comedienne in her rendering of numbers like "Ruth's Story Vignettes," in which she portrays the various repressed heroines of her own short stories. Her dramatic contralto invests "A Sure Way"--the still apt lament of the overly intelligent and therefore "unfeminine" woman--with just the right touch of cynicism...
...work, sings in a rich baritone, while P.D. Seltzer manages to wring more than a few laughs from his role as the weasely landlord of Christopher Street. Best of all is Paul Jackel's portrayal of Wreck, the football star from Trenton Tech. Highly energetic, Jackel exhibits superb comic timing and bounces around the stage with the ease...
...sometimes dated book by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields. Replete with references to people like Felix Frankfurter and Charles C. Dawes and now-defunct New Deal agencies like the NRA, Wonderful Town is in some ways a period piece. Fortunately, most of the play's humor derives from classic comic situations--the intelligent girl as social misfit, the pretty girl surrounded by suitors trying to out do each other to win her favor. Some of the Chodorov and Fields jokes are pretty unfunny now--Ruth is asked twice whether she strips, because "We're always looking for new faces...