Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,' a Party for Writers and Weirdos

New York Times

02-05-2025

Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind's eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers.
That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly 'Wonderful Town,' their 1953 musical set in and around the Village's crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney's autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it's really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine.
But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme 'learned to read' with 'André Gide.' And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play 'My Sister Eileen,' 'Wonderful Town' is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall's 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003.
The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs.
It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script's comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as 'the place for self-expression.'
But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make 'Wonderful Town' wonderful. Rose's way with a throwaway line, and Jackson's delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what's happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein's 'Ohio' with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they're singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest.
I won't take you through the painful details. In any case, what's most painful is something large: the way the presentational deficits of the production reveal the underlying material to be ickier than I'd imagined. Its satirical portrait of Ruth's ambition to be a writer — her stories, read aloud and performed as vignettes, are deliberately terrible — feels merely meanspirited now; its entirely flippant treatment of the wolfishness of the men attracted to Eileen steps over the border of sexual harassment.
That effect may also be a byproduct of time: It has been a momentous 25 years since Encores! first produced the show. Our expectations about what can be treated lightly no less than our expectations of dramatic coherence have changed a lot since then, let alone since 1953. Regardless of the production, 'Wonderful Town,' I'm sorry to report, is not aging well in either respect.
And yet: Bernstein's contribution feels as coherent as ever, and fresh and treasurable besides. The chance to hear a 28-person orchestra, led by Mary-Mitchell Campbell, ripping through the score's exhilarating pastiches and gently cradling its loveliness with strings, may, for some of us, override the production's many problems. That the dance numbers are by far the best aspect of the staging is at least partly to the composer's credit as well. He gives the choreographer Lorin Latarro a lot to work with; the new tap insertions, by Ayodele Casel, make a surprisingly good fit when paired with Bernstein's ecstatic polyrhythms.
After a pushy 'Urinetown,' a baffling 'Love Life' and now this 'Wonderful Town,' one cannot say that 2025 has been the standout Encores! season that 2024 was. It happens. But even without a high point of praise, we can hail the outgoing artistic director, Lear deBessonet, as she moves, after five years, to her new position as executive producer at Lincoln Center Theater. What she's done in those five years has been, regardless of hits or misses, nothing short of rejuvenating, finding in the series' peculiar mission some of the quirky spark and community spirit that gave rise to American musical theater in the first place. Like those hinterland émigrés cobbling together a revue at a boîte, Encores! at its best embodies the joyful ethos of teenagers putting on a show in a barn — even if the barn is City Center.