Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green | On the the Town / 1944

some other time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leonard Bernstein (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics) On the Town / Adelphi Theater, New York / December 28, 1944

 

Given a 24-hour shore leave, three sailor friends—Gabey, Ozzie and Chip—are let loose on the city of New York. All want to “see the sites,” particularly Chip, but they also seeking “romance and danger”: after all, it’s World War II, and the men have been long at sea. A helluva town, New York—where the “Bronx is up” (suggesting not only northern-most borough of the city but the vulgar cheer of contempt) and the “Battery’s down” (suggesting both the southern tip of Manhattan and a source of lagging energy), where one must endure an unbearable pace and “seven millions…screaming for space”—is ready and willing to greet them. Indeed the New York of On the Town, which premiered in 1944. is a city in love with strangers, a community that quickly embraces its visitors. No sooner is Ivy Smith named the subway system’s “Miss Turnstiles” of the month, than Gabey falls in love with her poster image.

       Brunhilde Esterhazy (the incomparable Nancy Walker in the original production), a taxi driver, invites Chip “up to her place.” Only after convincing him that the New York he is desperate to see—a city of the Hippodrome, “Tobacco Road,” and the Manhattan Aquarium—no longer exists, does he accept her offer, and is she able to prove that she cannot only make love but can cook too!

      Ozzie, meanwhile, has mistakenly visited the Museum of Natural History in search of Gabey’s Ivy (the poster has described her as studying painting at a museum); there he encounters Claire de Loon, a would-be anthropologist in search of a “sub-super-dolicocephalic head”—and any man attached. The two—in the original, the musical’s book and lyric writers Betty Green and Adolph Comden—quickly discover that they are kindred souls, people who easily get “Carried Away,” and, ultimately, as proof of their malady, destroy the museum’s rare dinosaur.

     For a short while, the friendly city is experienced by Gabey, wandering through Central Park, as “A Lonely Town”; but that feeling soon disappears when he discovers his long-sought Ivy at a Carnegie Hall studio, and she, immediately smitten with him, promises to meet him in Times Square at 11 PM. Due to previous commitments (enforced performances as a cooch dancer on Coney Island to pay for her ballet dancing lesson debts) Ivy is a no-show; but his friends and their dates, (along with a unsuitable substitute date for Gabey, Lucy Schmeeler) head out for a night on the town.

     Once more, Gabey perceives the lively city as a lonely place, but his friends cheer him up with their love and zaniness. When he discovers that Ivy is working on Coney Island, he quickly speeds off, via subway and nightmare ballet, to find her, while the others, recognizing that their 24 hours are almost over, sing Bernstein’s lovely lament to the end of their short-lived romances, “Some Other Time” (“This day was just a token, / Too many words are still unspoken. / Oh, well, we’ll catch up / Some other time.”).

     Gabey and Ivy are quickly reunited just in time for the all three sailors to return to their ship, replaced by a new trio on their way to see the “wonderful town.”

     I recount this plot, since many readers may have only seen the enjoyable, but less than perfect movie version which not only devotes a great deal of its energies on the characters’ attempts to escape authority, but also deletes the majority of the most charming of the original’s music and lyrics: “Carried Away,” “Lonely Town,” “Lucky to Be Me,” and “Some Other Time.” What I am most interested in conveying about the original is the near absolute excitement about the city itself. On the Town is a valentine to New York, a city presented as, perhaps, vulgar and fast-paced, but also loving, accepting, embracing. As Comden and Green write: New York is “a visitor’s place,” a world which loves outsiders.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, no. 1 (January 2006)