On The Town

The trouble with nostalgia is that is has no sense of discrimination. One moment that wonderful year is 1944, the next it is 1932 or 1920. Nostalgia demands only that you recall a few tunes, reset your hair, and throw in some period slang. If it's old, if it's quaint, if it's not too memorable, it can only be nostalgic.

Problem is that a year like 1944--the year in which Adolph Green and Betty Comden first appeared in On the Town, a show they had written in collaboration with a young composer by just like any other year. I have a hunch that there must have been a certain schizophrenia in the air. True, the war was on its way to being won, but perhaps underneath the sense of triumph there was also the lurking fear that the best years of many lives had already been lost. They may have danced in the streets the following year when victory was claimed first in Asia, then in Europe, but I would also guess that as the party ended there were those who trudged silently home in the morning light, knowing full well that they would never know again the relative mobility and freedom they had tasted during the years of the war.

So I think it's wrong to ignore the sense of fear and melancholy that really does pervade the subtext of On the Town. The plot itself is simple enough. Three sailors--Ozzie (Bill Gerber), Gabey (Kurt Peterson), and Chip (Jess Richards)--are on their first, one-day leave in New York City. They're cornfed types and, although between the three of them they don't want to miss a bit of what the city has to offer, they're mostly interested in girls. Particularly Miss Turnstyles, a subway poster girl with whom Gabey instantly falls in love, and who becomes the object of their day-long scavenger hunt. But don't kid yourself. The three aren't just bellbottomed versions of Cornelius Hackel and Barnaby Tucker determined not to "come home until we've kissed a girl." The three have no illusions of securing a happy ending, all they ask are just a few carefree hours. For then it's back to the ship (and perhaps to war and, if lucky, to home).

There are moments in Ron Field's revival of the show, now in a pre-Broadway tryout at the Shubert, when the fears and melancholy surface--in distinct contrast to the prevailing air of foolishness and mock sophistication. Certainly most disturbing is the weirdly undefined dream sequence in the second act when Gabey imagines Miss Turnstyles as an unobtainable socialite, surrounded by Ronald Searle-like caricatures of the rich. But for the most part this revival's spirits are too blithe. It strives for a simple-minded innocence when real recognition of the forties' blend of hell-bent pleasure and reluctantly perceived pain might instead give the show a genuine claim to poignance.

Comden & Green, it shouldn't be forgot, were once the bright young sophisticates of Broadway, and sophistication, even when faded with age, simply doesn't become the innocence of a blatantly naive confection like No, No Nanette. Sophistication ages far less gracefully. As writer-performers, Comden and Green have long since been overshadowed by teams like Nichols and May, as lyricists they're a long, long way from the current sophistication of a Stephen Sondheim. Twenty-seven years later, much of the humor of On the Town comes across as simply dumb. Here and there a nice try, perhaps, but nonetheless dumb. Consider a number like "Carried Away," sung by Ozzie and Claire de Lune, a female anthropologist played by Phillis Newman. (The two parts were played by Comden and Green in the original production.) It starts out promisingly, enough as the two love-crossed stars lament that their repressed natures are all too irrepressible (between the lines you can see that the humor is aimed at the same audience that would have appreciated Lady in the Dark), but ultimately it ends up sounding like the kind of clever parody that two gifted comics could extemporize in the midst of a slightly drunken party. That doesn't mean that it should be up there no stage, where its pretense of being all-to-knowing is simply irritating.

Don't get me wrong. You've got to give Comden, Green and Bernstein credit for taking on something as contemporary as New York at a time when there were those among the "realists" of the Broadway musical theater who had retreated to beautiful mornings in Oklahoma, dreamy isles in the South Pacific and clambakes in Maine. As musical history, On the Town is fascination, full of echoes of Gershwin (like the oddly operatic opening number, "I Feel Like I'm Not Out of Bed Yet") and campy vulgarizations of Porter (like the lyrics of "I Can Cook Too") as well as premonitions of Bernstein's later work in West Side Story (for, in Field's staging of the "Times Square Ballet," the Army and the Navy become warring gangs engaged in a dance in the gym). Still, if it's to be a successful revival, On the Town should have some real contemporary charm.

It's the girls in the cast who I think suffer most. Since the three female leads play roles that are largely comic (in an interesting reversal of the expected sex roles, the men in the show are the more sentimental), they must carry the weight of the dated trappings. Bernadette Peters (who's made quite a name for herself in other bouts with nostalgia like Dames at Sea and Curley McDimple) is most successful in breaking from type. She's wonderful as a kind of Tillie the Toiler suddenly gone hot on sex. She's got a voice with which you wouldn't care to argue and a way with inflections that almost makes words unnecessary. Fresh out of Company. Donna McKechnie is Ivy, a kootch dancer whose one claim to fame is being named Miss Turnstyles. She does everything Field's choreography asks of her decently enough, and since that never seems to permit her to be half as exciting as she can be I think she should ask for more. Rounding out the trio is Phyllis Newman, a nice enough lady and a good enough trouper, but also somewhat miscast in this show full of ingenues. As for the men, well, the three are smooth-shaven and as enthusiastic as all hell, but so interchangeable that none is really outstanding.

At the root of it, what the show really lacks is its own special style. Most of James Trittipo's sets seem to misfire (for example, Gabey's ballad "Lonely Town" is played against a sky-blue background interrupted only by three stalagmite-like skyscrapers which make the place look more like Monument Valley), although the first act's Times Square design, crowded with neon that even extends to a multi-colored proscenium, hits pointblank. Crowded up against the footlights, the large ensemble looks exactly like the blatantly artificial casts that people the production stills I've seen from the period. (One other bit of nostalgia I could go for in a big way would be the removal of the floor mikes that distort half the sound of this show. Who wants to hear a chorus sound as if it's singing in the middle of a brush fire?)

However, the real test that will determine whether this revival to make it is director Field's choreography. A good deal of Bernstein's score is given over to programmatic dance sequences which Field (apparently in fear of comparisons with Jerome Robbins' original stagings) never fully utilizes. But, gee, Mr. Field, there are those of us who weren't even around to see the original so you do have give us something better than the listless mime that comprises the "Miss Turnstyle Ballet" and the tentative exercises that accompany "Lonely Town." As it now stands, On the Town needs to find a rhythm of its own.

Obviously then, more is needed here than the simple luck and pluck that, as legend has it, was enough to save all those musicals in the thirties. I tend to doubt that, as Esquire would have us believe, the forties were the last time America was happy. We had begun whistling in the dark a good bit earlier than that. Which means that if On the Town is to be revived it must be revived with all of its original complexities and simplicities intact. O-K, I'll grant you it's a helluva task, but then New York, New York, it's a helluva town.