Gil Hates Everything

Anyone with a long-ish memory for GHM writeups might be forgiven for asking a pertinent question here: surely you reviewed this already, Gil, or something very like it? This show has music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and it’s about New York. Did I like this show better when it was called “On The Town”?

Well, as opposed to that earlier show, which was ballet-inspired, and very much about the marvels of New York as seen by (effectively) tourists, this is a take on New York as seen by women relocating from Ohio to Greenwich Village. It has a much smaller focus, and is infused with less unreal magic. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse, he says in advance of hearing it, but it does explain why the same team came back for more.

The story doesn’t look very interesting, gotta say, and the high concept (“girls from Ohio come to NYC to make it big”) is much less immediate and has fewer interesting constraints than “three sailors hit the town on twenty-four hours’ shore leave”. The point of a clear high concept is that it makes you think “well that’s awesome, it writes itself”, when of course it doesn’t and you don’t really have a clear idea of what will happen (beyond the ability to be disappointed if it doesn’t meet expectations once you’ve seen it). The danger of the high concept approach is that just because you can express the concept in brief, that doesn’t of itself make the concept interesting. What’s more important is a strong opening, and here, the opening songs are functional, but it takes a while for them to set up their milieu; the characters don’t promote themselves and their lives with the necessary urgency. Contrast this with, say, the opening number of “West Side Story”, where within three minutes you know everything you need to know about the Jets and the Sharks. This show is a touch too generic.

However, once it hits its stride, “Wonderful Town” has its moments. “One Hundred Ways To Lose A Man”, in which one of the girls berates herself for a lack of romantic bubbleheadedness, is still funny (although the pedant in me is irritated by the fact that it only lists four ways and then stops – “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” at least iterates enough ways that you’re prepared to concede that there might be fifty). “What A Waste” is also kinda funny, although it continues to the point of diminishing returns. “Conversation Piece”, in which embarrassed characters try to make small talk at dinner, is fitfully amusing in the lyrics and is carried by the smirking music. Bernstein’s knack for dance music pays off in “Conga”, and then he has another swing at it in “Swing”, although, warning, this song features a liberal dollop of “cats”, “jive”, and “digging”. Music is still emerging from the 40s at this point, and the fit with musical theatre is not yet exactly perfect. There’s a really fucking embarrassing scat/improv section in “Swing” which rams this point home: if I never hear a woman say “f’doi” again it’ll be too soon. Whether it was Sondheim sounding more at ease with the vernacular, or the use of younger and more alienated characters in “West Side Story”, “Cool” is much better. As for the “Wrong Note Rag” near the end, it’ll deliberately set your teeth on edge.

After an appropriate bunch of random semi-comic misadventures, the two sisters get their dream jobs (singer and writer) and there you go, all done. I’m not sold on this as a show I’d like to see, and over half the songs sail by without really landing a hit on their targets, but I’m not sure Bernstein ever wrote an intolerably hideous piece of music, so it’s probably worth a listen on that score. And the above-mentioned comedy songs are still in working order. But this is nowhere enough to propel this into the GHM hall of fame: the situation and its implementation are generic enough that you suspect there must be newer, better shows which cover the same ground, and the fact that the shenanigans aren’t saturated in a grand historio-mythic hyper-reality means that it doesn’t clear the bar set by “On The Town” nine years earlier.

Random Panda awards “Wonderful Town” five out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted 2009)