it’s love
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov
(book, based upon their play My Sister
Eilleen, based on the stories by Ruth McKenney), Betty Comden and Adolph
Green (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) Wonderful Town / produced by
LAOpera, conducted by Grant Gershon / the performance Howard and I saw was
December 4, 2016, a matinee performance
In preparation for the centennial of
Leonard Bernstein’s birth, California and Los Angeles is, as Los Angeles Times music critic, Mark
Swed noted, way ahead of the curve. Last summer Michael Tilson Thomas conducted
the San Francisco Symphony in a semi-staged version of On the Town, and more recently, Gustavo Dudamel performed a version
of Bernstein’s West Side Story at the
Hollywood Bowl. I saw neither of these highly praised productions. But
yesterday my husband Howard and I did attend a glorious semi-staged production,
conducted by the Los Angeles Chorale director, Grant Gershon, of Wonderful Town.
I saw a full Broadway revival of this
sweet-toothed musical in 2004, and wrote about it, along with other Bernstein
works, in My Year 2004, so I won’t
retell the full story of the two
There’s always a problem, or at least a
fear, when I hear that an opera company is going to produce a work of
light-opera and dialogue such as this musical. Although opera performers are
becoming, over the years, increasingly versatile, I still recall wonderful
singers such as Leontyne Price stiffly singing “Tis a gift to be simple” and
other such painful incursions of great opera singers such as Luciano Pavorotti
trying to make his way through a song from Cats.
Fortunately, under Gershon’s talented hand, the LAOpera turned, this time, to
mostly Broadway veterans, such as the comically brilliant singer/actor Faith
Prince as Ruth Sherwood, the young Nikki M. James for her sister Eileen (who,
apparently, is an even better dancer than she is a charming singer), Roger
Bart, playing numerous roles, a wonderful character actor, and the
strong-voiced baritone, Kudisch, who did nicely by his role.
These singers stood at music stands on
the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, backed by a large contingent of
what I presume are the LAOpera orchestra members. If in a few moments, the
tempo seemed a little sluggish, overall it was brightly played, with even
director Gershon getting in on the jolly Irish jig of “My Darlin’ Eileen,”
which demonstrates the attraction of Eileen to the entire police force of the
local Greenwich Village station after the two sisters get into trouble by
dancing the resplendent “Conga” through the local streets.
How could you not love a musical whose
very second song—after a tourist like trip through the village, helped along in
this production with 1950s-like cinematic projections by Hana S. Kim—is the
wailing “Ohio.” If Prince doesn’t quite have the heft of a Rosalind Russell,
who makes the song sound a bit like the mooing cows and mewling cats of the
character’s home state, Prince does a perfectly credible job. And she finds her
comic stride in the hilarious “One Hundred Easy Ways (to Lose a Man),” a song
almost as perfect for her many theatrical talents revealed in Guys and Dolls’ “Adelaide’s Lament,” a
Broadway moment that I will never forget.
Eileen gets her chance to sing out in “A Little Bit of Love,” in which
she reveals her admiration for the gentle soda jerk Frank Lippencott, while
soon after switching her mind to the next man she meets. She gets her chance to
reveal her dancing talents in “Conga,” along with nearly everyone in this cast,
leading off a trail of conga lovers, but ending it in a series of lifted
cartwheels without hardly losing her breath, let alone getting as dizzy as
those movements made me as I sat in the audience.
And, yes, I have heard more spirited
versions of the musical’s final “Wrong Note Rag,” in which Bernstein almost
painfully blasts our ears with continued off-key combinations of music—both
Russell’s recorded versions and the Broadway revival of 2004 did this
better—but Prince, James, and the marvelous LAOpera chorus members still got
through it quite nicely. Even the “Wreck” (Ben Crawford) gave us a nice
rendition of “Pass the Football.”
The final Conga performed by the entire
cast as they exited out the audience doorways, absolutely delighted this large
audience, which gave everyone a standing performance. If not the greatest gift
to Broadway theater (after all, both On
the Town and West Side Story are
far greater musicals), it pleases, and in a production such as this one, with
only 3 performances, who can find a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?
Los Angeles, December 5, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2016).
