Last week I rang in the holiday season by trekking through
heavy traffic to Downtown L.A. (now fashionably known as DTLA). My destination:
the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where some Broadway and L.A. Opera stars
appeared in a semi-staged concert version of Wonderful Town. Though this musical boasts music by Leonard
Bernstein and lyrics by the incomparable Comden and Green, it should not be
confused with the similarly-titled On the
Town. That 1945 Broadway hit – about three sailors on shore leave in the
Big Apple -- launched a very young Bernstein, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden
(along with choreographer Jerome Robbins) on brilliant careers. Wonderful
Town, also set in New York City, came along in 1953; Bernstein, Comden, and
Green were asked to step in, on short notice, to replace Leroy Anderson’s
original score. Working quickly, they more than filled the bill with a nifty
combination of comic songs, love ballads, Irish ditties, and a tour-de-force
conga number that had playgoers tempted to dance in the aisles.
The genesis of Wonderful
Town was a series of autobiographical stories by journalist Ruth McKenney.
Her wry tales of moving from the Midwest to a basement apartment in kooky
Greenwich Village, accompanied by her winsome younger sibling, were eventually
collected into a popular 1938 book, My
Sister Eileen. This was soon adapted into a stage comedy of the same name,
starring Shirley Booth as the acerbic older sister struggling to find both a
job and a man. (Feminists would cringe at the basic set-up: the smart sister
goes dateless for most of the play while the adorable young Eileen quickly has
men groveling at her pretty feet.) Ten years later, the musical was launched,
with Rosalind Russell and adorably blonde Edie Adams in the starring roles.
Hit musicals of that era generally ended up as movies, often
with a good deal of reworking. When On
the Town was filmed in 1949, it rated a truly wonderful cast. Gene Kelly,
Jules Munshin, and a very young Frank Sinatra were the singing, dancing sailors;
their girls were memorably played by Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller, and feisty Betty
Garrett. I love this film, despite the fact that Bernstein’s original ballet
music was deeply trimmed, and several of the catchy Comden and Green songs were
swapped out. As for Wonderful Town,
it was never exactly filmed at all. Instead there was a film titled My Sister Eileen that scrapped all of
the stage show’s original music, substituting unmemorable new tunes by Jule Styne
and Leo Robbin. (Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, and Jack Lemmon were the major
players, with soon-to-be famous Bob Fosse in a featured role.)
The real Ruth McKenney, as a teenager, had considered
herself so homely that she attempted suicide. But in later years she truly did
make her mark as both a journalist and a writer of fiction. She married, got
interested (for a while) in leftwing politics, and raised two children.(I’m
told her daughter eventually became a justice of the New York Supreme Court.)
Eileen eventually married the talented Nathanael West, who
shook up the literary world of the 1930s with darkly satiric short novels like Miss Lonelyhearts. Hollywood soon came
calling, and the experience gave West the material for the most devastating of
movieland novels, 1939’s The Day of the
Locust. In late 1940, West and Eileen were driving back from Mexico when he
ran a stop sign in El Centro, California. There was a collision, and both were
killed. So the real Eileen died four days before Wonderful Town was scheduled to begin its Broadway run. Talk about
ending on a sad note.
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