When “Wonderful Town,” the musical by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the 1940 play “My Sister Eileen” by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, opened on Broadway in February, 1953, it was a hit. It ran for 559 performances.
When the musical was revived in 2002, it ran for 497. Now, after seeing Los Angeles Opera’s concert-style performance Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the question that puzzles me, is why?
What is it about this show that made it such a success? The play is basically a lightweight screw ball comedy. And Bernstein’s score is essentially a pastiche of styles, from an Irish jig and high-kicking conga line, to a succession of predictably crafted (decidedly unmemorable) show tunes — not one of which has found its way into the great American Songbook.
The music is filled with jazzy syncopated brass that offers more than a nod to the uptown style of Count Basie and Duke Ellington. But for the most part, Bernstein’s tunes are generic without a defining sense of signature character.
“Wonderful Town” certainly doesn’t possess the flare Bernstein demonstrated in his first collaboration with Comden and Green, “On the Town” (in 1944), the brilliance he would soon develop in his opera, “Candide” (1956) and ultimately for his musical-theater masterpiece, “West Side Story” (in 1957).
The plot of “Wonderful Town” is pure screwball comedy featuring a cast of diverse denizens of Bohemian Greenwich Village, circa 1935. But (at least from a contemporary perspective) they come across more as a succession of social stereotypes than as real people, as do the incidents that drive this story of two Ohio girls (one seductive, Eileen, the other brainy and standoffish, Ruth) who arrive in the Big Apple bent on taking the city by storm.
Never mind the fact that it’s the height of the Depression; breadlines and people leaping out of office windows are not a factor. It’s all Bohemian zaniness on Christopher Street.
This is not to say LA Opera’s partially staged adaptation by David Lee, conducted by Grant Gershon, with choreography by Peggy Hickey and animated background projections by Hana S. Kim, isn’t fun. It is. It’s a lot of fun. It’s just not (in my estimation) that good a show. It certainly isn’t vintage Bernstein, whose 100th birthday is being widely celebrated.
The cast is uniformly strong, topped by a duo of Broadway Tony Award winners: Faith Prince (“Guys and Dolls”) plays Ruth Sherwood, the woman who can’t land a man to save her life; and Nikki M. James (“The Book of Mormon”) as her sister, Eileen, whose wide-eyed innocence and saucy personality attracts men like bees to honey.
Prince’s performance is a joy, particularly as she laments her lovelorn fate in the song, “One Hundred Easy Ways” to lose a man. Her performance is a wonderful combination of grit, determination and romantic self-destruction.
James, on the other hand, is like an innocent fawn amid a city of testosterone-propelled bucks. She’s never met a man she didn’t like, and vice versa.
The dialog and plot are condensed through the introduction of a moderator, the skilled Roger Bart, who sets the scenes and plays a wide variety of parts.
To say he wears many hats in this production, each with its own distinct personality is an understatement. The direction by Lee is crisp and the action, silly as it is, moves at a goodly clip.
The cast includes the opportunistic landlord, Mr. Appopolous (Tony Abbatamarco); the big-shouldered, dim-witted football player, Wreck (Ben Crawford); his secret wife, Helen (Julia Aks); the jaded publisher, Robert Baker (Marc Kudisch); the nice guy who manages the local Woolworths, Frank Lippencott (Jared Gertner); along with conga line of Brazilian sailors and crooning chorus of Irish cops.
Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
Wonderful Town
Rating: 3 stars.
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 Grand Ave. Los Angeles.
Next: 2016-17 season continues with “Abduction,” opening Jan. 28.
Information: laopera.com.
