“Such interesting people live on Christopher Street,” sings a chorus of tourists who swoon at the writers, actors, and other artists inhabiting Greenwich Village, the “quaint” and “sweet” “place for self-expression” hailed in Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town. Director Zhailon Levingston’s recent revival for City Center’s Encores! series, which presents classic Broadway musicals as part of its founding mission “to bring performing arts to the people of New York City at an affordable price” ($185 for an orchestra seat), is the company’s first since 2000.
New York has changed much since the millennial year, and even more since the sated 1950s of Wonderful Town’s composition and more turbulent 1930s of its setting. Neither decade in the city would be comprehensible to the Aperol Spritz-swilling twentysomethings who now inhabit Greenwich Village. The show lacks the memorable tunes of Bernstein’s earlier ode to Gotham, On the Town (1944), and the Shakespearean possibilities of his later West Side Story (1957), but it tells a timeless tale of its own. In a trope as relevant now as it was then, two provincial sisters—shy and awkward Ruth, brassy and outgoing Eileen—arrive from Columbus, Ohio, with big dreams of “conquering” New York in its classic fields of aspiration: writing and acting. In a comedy of manners, they “make it” despite hilarious humiliations and find both promising employment and romantic success—a safe bourgeois love match for Ruth, universal male attention for Eileen.
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In his revival, which closed May 11, Levingston seeks to “recontextualize” Wonderful Town to include what the program calls “the full, multiethnic spectrum of New Yorkers who have made this town ‘wonderful’ all along.” His solution: cast black women as Ruth and Eileen, expecting that racializing the sisters “lends different stakes” to their story. We never learn what those stakes are, however. Levingston is faithful to the original book and lyrics, which contain nothing reflecting “blackness” or any hint of the real racial tension that would probably have manifested if the original 1930s characters actually had been black. Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson are splendid performers on their own merits and gave entertaining performances as Ruth and Eileen, but the implications of their skin color went nowhere beyond performing characters that in all relevant contexts remained as white as Wagner’s Sieglinde did when Jessye Norman sang the role at the Met 40 years ago. If Levingston is “really interested to see the story of two Black [sic] women pursuing their dreams,” he should find a play on that subject.
Trying to imagine “blackness” in Wonderful Town to accentuate its setting’s “multiethnic” dimension is especially ironic. The original show already includes a diverse array of identities and contexts, including its final dance number, “Wrong Note Rag,” a spirited tribute to the quintessentially black ragtime idiom. It seems to have impressed Levingston so weakly that he engaged a special choreographer to insert tap dance elsewhere in the musical. When the sisters arrive on Christopher Street, they rent their squalid apartment from Mr. Appopolous, a Greek immigrant. Levingston noted in an interview that their neighborhood was the birthplace of the NAACP, but he seems unaware that Christopher Street’s most famous establishment, the Stonewall Inn, became the birthplace of the gay rights movement just 16 years after Bernstein’s show premiered. The first half ends with Ruth attempting to interview a group of Brazilian sailors with limited English who insist that she teach them the conga, a Cuban dance whose exuberant performance includes the entire cast. Eileen’s unflagging sex appeal enchants the local police precinct, staffed entirely by Irish immigrant cops, a quartet of whom serenade her in strains traditional to their home country in Bernstein’s song “My Darlin’ Eileen.”
This does not appear to be the “diversity” Levingston would prefer, but it is diversity, nevertheless. Nor did Levingston risk even basic alterations of the text to achieve what he wanted. Despite his directorial vision and Jackson’s African American background, her Eileen still wards off the flirtatious Irish cops by telling them that she is of Scottish and Swedish heritage, instantly belying the director’s fantasy that we are watching a black woman pursue her dreams or do anything else.
If the director truly wanted to be bold, a better approach might have been to give Wonderful Town a contemporary edge. As a text about the city, it is ripe with possibilities for relevant and even hip (or, in the language of the show, “hep”) social commentary. Levingston may not be up on his Gen Z slang, but “Ohio”—the state the sisters come from and the title of their entrance lament and second half reprise—has entered the vernacular as an adjective meaning “weird,” “awkward,” or “absurd.” This is, of course, what the sisters are when they arrive in New York, but the modern irony is lost. For political commentary, the director need not have looked any farther than the first line of “Conga!,” which begins with Ruth asking the dance-mad Brazilian sailors “What do you think of the USA, NRA, TVA?” In the 1930s, the “NRA” referred to the National Recovery Administration, a New Deal regulatory authority, but to contemporary audiences it more readily connotes the National Rifle Association, which could have made for a saucy comment on the very New York topic of guns and crime. Ruth finding romance with her boss—a potentially fatal misstep in professional life these days—merits no comment, nor does her frankly sexist observation in song (“One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man”) that smart women are romantically off-putting.
In perhaps the show’s greatest lapse of awareness, it gave no attention to the modern gentrification of Greenwich Village, where the sisters rent for $65 a month. Today, according to StreetEasy, a basic one-bedroom on Christopher Street commands $5,000 or more—a sum likelier to be paid by aspirants enjoying parental funding from the solid burghers of Columbus than by those looking to conquer the Big City on their own.
Photo by Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos via Getty Images