Wonderful Town | |
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2003 Revival Logo
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Music | Leonard Bernstein |
Lyrics |
Betty Comden Adolph Green |
Book |
Joseph A. Fields Jerome Chodorov |
Basis | Joseph A. Fields's and Jerome Chodorov's play My Sister Eileen |
Productions | 1953 Broadway 1986 West End 2003 Broadway revival 2006 Non-Equity U.S. Tour |
Awards | Tony Award for Best Musical |
Wonderful Town is a 1953 musical with book written by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Leonard Bernstein. The musical tells the story of two sisters who aspire to be a writer and actress respectively, seeking success from their basement apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village. It is based on Fields and Chodorov's 1940 play My Sister Eileen, which in turn originated from autobiographical short stories by Ruth McKenney first published in The New Yorker in the late 1930s and later published in book form as My Sister Eileen. Only the last two stories in McKenney's book were used, and they were heavily modified.
Wonderful Town premiered on Broadway in 1953, winning five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and spawned three New York City Center productions between 1958 and 1966, a 1986 West End production and 2003 Broadway revival. It is a lighter piece than Bernstein's later works, West Side Story and Candide, but none of the songs have become as popular.
During the summer of 1935 in Greenwich Village, New York, a tour guide leads a group of sightseers on a tour of Christopher Street and its colorful residents.