About the work
Wonderful Town is a musical by Leonard Bernstein (music) with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and a book by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, premiered on Broadway in 1953. Based on the play My Sister Eileen, it won the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Plot
In the 1930s, sisters Ruth and Eileen Sherwood move from Ohio to New York to pursue their dreams in Greenwich Village: Ruth as a writer, the pretty Eileen as an actress. In their shabby basement apartment they experience a series of comic entanglements with eccentric neighbours, hapless suitors, and the challenges of big-city life, until both, in their own way, find success and love.
Cultural significance
Wonderful Town shows Bernstein's masterful fusion of jazz, swing, and symphonic Broadway sound, just a few years before West Side Story. The score sparkles with wit and urban energy, as in Conga! and Ohio. The work is an affectionate homage to 1930s New York and to the dreams of young people who move to the big city.