Wonderful Town (Original Broadway Cast)

Despite the success of the 1944 Broadway musical On the Town, which ran 463 performances and was adapted into a film, its composer, Leonard Bernstein, did not intend to continue writing music for the theater, at least not on a full-time basis, preferring to stick to his conducting duties. He relented at the urging of his On the Town lyrical partners Betty Comden and Adolph Green to come in at the last minute and help them replace the unsatisfactory initial song score for Wonderful Town, a musical based on the play My Sister Eileen (in turn based on a series of short stories) about two sisters, one pretty but dumb, the other plain but smart, who move from their native Ohio to New York's Greenwich Village in the 1930s and struggle to make it in the big city. The story provided an opportunity for both the composer and the lyricists to satirize an era two decades and a world war in the past, and they did so with relish. Comden and Green have never really progressed beyond their early days in their nightclub act the Revuers (for which Bernstein provided piano playing) in the sense that they preferred to write "special material," rather than regular theater songs, witty, somewhat sarcastic observations like "One Hundred Easy Ways," in which the smart sister laments having to pretend to be dumb in order to attract men; "What a Waste," in which a magazine editor caustically describes what happens to idealistic young people when they flock to New York and become disillusioned; and "Pass That Football," in which a former college gridiron god explains how the way has been greased for him in life because of his athletic ability. Their love songs ("A Little Bit in Love," "It's Love") are noticeably more ordinary. For his part, Bernstein wants to make fun of such popular ‘30s styles as "Swing!" and "Conga!," the exclamation marks signaling that the music is commenting on the genres, not just replicating them. (Irish music comes in for humorous treatment in "My Darlin' Eileen," and Bernstein brings modern classical music to jazz in the sharp -- in more ways than one -- "Wrong Note Rag.") But then, this is musical comedy, so Bernstein, Comden, and Green are not to be criticized too harshly for finding comedy in their music. As the smart sister, Rosalind Russell leads an excellent cast also featuring Edith Adams as Eileen, the pretty sister.