There is a historical lineage to City Center’s 2025 presentation of Wonderful Town (booking to May 11), even if this distinctly underwhelming and shaky Encores! production is not likely to head to Broadway following in the previously stellar paths of Into the Woods and Parade.
Wonderful Town can certainly be done well. First performed on Broadway in 1953, when it won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Choreography, its first City Center revival came five years later in 1958. The next Encores! revival was mounted in 1963, then another in 1967. The 2000 Encores! revival transferred to Broadway in 2003, winning a Tony for Best Choreography (watch this video of Donna Murphy at the 2004 Tony Awards, singing the number “Swing,” to see why).
The duos playing sisters Ruth (the sensible one, wannabe journalist), and Eileen (the fun one), newly arrived in New York and looking to make their marks in the big city in 1938 Greenwich Village, have been impressive. Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams took on the roles in 1953, Nancy Walker and Jo Sullivan Loesser in 1958, Kaye Ballard and Jacquelyn McKeever in 1963, Elaine Stritch and Linda Bennett in 1967, Murphy and Laura Benanti in 2000, then Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt in 2003.
In this production Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson take on the roles of Ruth and Eileen respectively. Both are engaging performers—with Jackson particularly ladling her role with all the daffy energy playing Eileen demands—but this musical is a poorly conceived showcase for both actors.
As with every Encores! production, any criticism comes with the coda that the rehearsal process is short. Some of the actors hold and read from scripts on stage. Despite the presence of sets and action, the program is at pains to make clear this is a “concert performance.” But it doesn’t look like one. It’s a demi-mounted production of a show.
One welcome constant: Encores! music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s stewarding of the excellent orchestra, animating the music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the book is by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov).
However, directed by Zhailon Levingston, this Wonderful Town never makes coherent sense of the musical’s static and scattergun plot, or sketches meaningful context for its broad (and extremely grating) comic characters. It also suffers from a punishingly long and dreary first act. One person near me remarked to their companion as the curtain rose on the second, “I checked. I promise the second act is shorter.”
The sober, sensible Ruth seems beached amid the loopy behavior of her sister and the other characters. You don’t sense her drive to be a journalist is that serious, particularly when she ends up, at the end of act one, in a not fun-looking number featuring Conga dancing and some sailors. The choreography here looks so perilous instead of thrilling, you want to leap up to check the company is going to keep Ruth/Rose safe as she is shakily manhandled and hoisted aloft.
In the program, Levingston talks about the importance of both Ruth and Eileen being Black in this production, showing the perspective of two young Black women pursuing their dreams in New York at this moment with some lines—such as telling them to go back to where they came from—taking on an added vicious context. The diverse company emphasizes a New York City just as multicultural in the past as in the present.
But the stakes facing the sisters never feel pressing because they are surrounded by such flatly drawn co-characters—Baker, a nice-guy editor (Javier Muñoz); crude doofus Chick (John Rapson); Wreck, a former footballer player having his own love life issues (Fergie Philippe); and lovelorn dweeb Frank (Etai Benson) trailing after Eileen. These characters are so aggressively unengaging you dearly hope the sisters find their way in New York far from all of them.
Two repeated songs are done well: the sisters’ beautiful, lament-tinged duet of leaving “Ohio,” which sounds reminiscent of Doris Day’s “The Black Hills of Dakota,” and the lushly cute “It’s Love,” which finally welds Ruth to Baker. But it’s hard to buy its sentiment when Baker hasn’t given up on his creepily controlling vision of a “quiet Ruth” he has sung winsomely about only minutes before.
The second act flows much more smoothly than the first—and so, for those who stay (on the night I went, many seats were empty for act two), there is a mercifully brisk gallop to the end mostly enlivened by Jackson, who finds the joy and fun not just in Eileen but the show itself.
For all you sense New York as a city in Wonderful Town—Lorin Latarro’s choreography (with occasional tap by Ayodele Casel) conjures up the kind of intense urban churn as recognizable in 2025 as 1935—you never sense the spirit of its population. The musical’s characters seem dumb and trivial, not savvy and engaged. New York may leave a typical resident exhausted at the end of a typical day, but it’s pretty damning to have a musical about New York leave an audience feeling the same.
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