Word: ruth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...European, the Games is a track-and-field championship, while for American TV viewers it's a reason to go all gooey-eyed over winsome teenage gymnasts, and for Turks it's a celebration of weight lifting. True, a few stars transcend their sports and a regional base. Babe Ruth, Pelé and Michael Jordan did so, and today I'd put David Beckham, Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods in the same category-but very few others manage that trick...
...story of the weekend was the dominant sailing of Harvard sophomore skipper Vince Porter and crew Ruth Schlitz in the B-division...