Wonderful Town

Wonderful Town has a better claim to the term musical comedy than any show you're likely to see this year. Combining a distinctive score by Leonard Bernstein and a book which is My Sister Eileen almost intact, the products have set music to the play rather than the play to music. As a result, Wonderful Town is a rare compound of expert--if familiar--comedy with the elegant adjuncts of a top quality musical.

Though perhaps too well-remembered, My Sister Eileen is till a very funny play. The comic repliques of the 1940 hit dominate the new production, but Wonderful Town integrates script and melody with great success. Paced by George Abbott's direction, the show completely skirts tedium and glides from dialogue to song without quash of gears on diminished quality. The further assets of a choice east headed by Rosalind Russell and handsome settings by Raonl Pene du Bois make Wonderful Town a seek and thoroughly delight ful show.

The saga of the Sherwood sisters from Columbus, Ohio and their misadventures in a Greenwich Village basement with a past should be pretty well known by now. Certainly it is to Rosalind Russell who to creates her old role as the protective elder sister. A charmingly casual comedienne. Miss Russell plays the long suffering Ruth with lump angularity and delivers the play's best lines with superb timing. She is also more than adequate to the musical demands of Wonderful Town, meeting them with a surprisingly strong voice and high good humon. When a song is clearly out of her range, as in a melancholy duct about Ohio, she songs her part with a deadpan expression which is more comic than the lyrics.

No one woman show in any means, Wonderful Town, has an impressively versatile cast which sings as expertly as it tosses off the lines of the script. Edith Adams is a suitably attractive Eileen, while George Gaynes and Jordan Bentley are outstanding as the magazine editor and the football player, "Wreck."

With the same vigor and originality which marked Bernstein's score for On the Town, his music is a pleasant change from the trite insipidity of current show tunes. "Wrong Note Rag" piques the ear with delightful dissonance, and in "Pass That Football," a tribute to the well-paid college athlete, the eloquent stupidity of Bernstein's lumbering rhythm is as comic as the lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. While the intricacy of some of his music challenges both the lyricist and the singer's enunciation, Bernstein can write simple and memorable melodies. Wonderful Town has at least two songs hard to forget--"A Little Bit of Love" and "A Quiet Girl," but Bernstein's score will probably claim more space in your memory.

The production is as attractive visually as it is aurally. Du Bois' colorful sets have remarkable depth. With skyscrapers in the distance, his Greenwich Village garden has a striking perspective, but best of all is his Village nightclub with deep reds, clutter of paintings, and mammoth mobiles. His costumes for the dances staged by Donald Saddler are equally imaginative, particularly in an expressive number about the sister's hunt for job's and in the adagio jitter-bug of the nightclub scene.

When Wonderful Town finishes the Boston run, it will set off for Philadelphia and two weeks more of "polishing." I don't know why; the show has a high luster already.