THEATER: OLD SHOWS, NEW SPIRIT

• Share

When On the Town opened in 1944, New York, New York really was a helluva town. And Broadway was one fabulous art form. Oklahoma!, cornpone revolutionizer of the musical, was playing nearby, and Carousel was about to open. Kurt Weill, Sigmund Romberg, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen all had new shows. As for the new kids, two of On the Town's creators were 31: Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the co-stars who wrote the show. Two were 26: composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins.

What does Broadway offer today? As many revivals as new shows, if you exclude from "new" the epics (a la Cats) that have been running so long they need reviving. The fact that last season's big noise was a replay of the 1975 Chicago might have left Broadway in a funk. Instead, it has sent producers to the musical trunk, foraging for A Funny Thing II.

If dig we must for a better New York theater, then let the excavators be two of the town's brightest directors. Scott Ellis' 1776, at the Roundabout, and George C. Wolfe's On the Town, playing this week at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park but with eyes on a Broadway transfer, are refreshing summer mints that could be a treat for all seasons.

When 1776 (songs by Sherman Edwards, book by Peter Stone) opened in 1969, few expected it to make it to the curtain call. A show about the writing of the Declaration of Independence? When the show beat out Hair for the Tony, some folks saw a revisionist plot. Yet 1776--a political debate with songs--could also be viewed as a metaphor for the fight over Vietnam. It was just as rancorous, as full of fury and compromise.

At times, 1776 forgets it's a musical and devotes an unsung half-hour to the great questions of the day: How can we get idealistic, insufferable John Adams (Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation) to shut up? Will Thomas Jefferson (Paul Michael Valley) have sex in time to write his masterpiece? And would Benjamin Franklin (the benign curmudgeon Pat Hingle) please invent air conditioning--right away? It's a tribute to Ellis' pristine staging that the plot moves as smoothly and, yes, suspensefully as it did 28 or 221 years ago. Come as a skeptic, choose favorite Founding Fathers, feel like an avid student again, shed a tear, go home thrilled.

On the Town starts with a thrill: a facsimile of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the stage, with the orchestra perched on it. Three sailors (winsome Jose Llana, robust Robert Montano, gangly Jesse Tyler Ferguson) roam wartime New York and hook up with three gals (petite Sophia Salguero, glamorous Kate Suber, fireplug Lea DeLaria). They go places, do things, and the night air is magical, electric with fun. Wolfe brings Bergdorf mannequins and Natural History Museum troglodytes alive. Actors come with their own sound effects (taxi, subway, siren). It's like a vivid old New Yorker cartoon, animated by Tex Avery.

Comden and Green, who were in the Central Park audience on opening night, know that On the Town is no museum piece. For the 1949 film version, they replaced most of Bernstein's brassy score with more razzmatazzy tunes. But Wolfe has jettisoned Robbins' choreography for dances by Eliot Feld that don't buoy the production; they give it stretch marks. Better to cut these and let the show soar as an all-out musical comedy.