The Hallé perform Bernstein's Wonderful Town in Salford

When Leonard Bernstein conducted his 1956 operetta Candide with the LSO in December 1989, his many admirers hoped it would mark the beginning of a comprehensive series of his theatre works, all performed in concert, with first-rate singer-actors and a world-class symphony orchestra. It was not to be. Lenny died the following October and it was Michael Tilson Thomas, in the spring of 1992, who picked up the baton for the LSO’s dazzling concert performances of On the Town. Five years later the LSO presented an abridged concert version of his 1976 bicentennial flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in the revised guise of a White House Cantata, conducted by Kent Nagano. It was a curate’s egg of a piece, but much of the music merits repeated hearings, as the subsequent DG recording testifies. West Side Story is an acknowledged masterpiece and hardly lacking in advocacy, but the work many of us would have most loved to hear Lenny conduct was Wonderful Town, which is so often relegated to the status of runt of the litter, despite winning five Tony awards in 1953, including those for Best Musical and also best actress in a musical, which went to Rosalind Russell, the star for whom the show had largely been written. Somehow this characteristically witty and tuneful piece has been overshadowed by its younger siblings, not least Candide, which in contrast survived a woeful opening run on Broadway to become a beloved repertory piece across the globe.

In the last UK production of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, in 1986, Maureen Lipman gamely took her first singing role as Ruth and that fine, perennially underrated actor Ray Lonnen brought heart-stopping depth and pathos to the role of Bob Baker, the hardened and disillusioned hack who ultimately melts and discovers love in the finale of the piece. The production received decent notices and enjoyed a decent, if unremarkable, run of nine months or so. On both the occasions I saw it, I left in a state of near-delirium, profoundly uplifted by the fact that something so daftly surreal and so full of pure charm could find its way onto a commercial stage in the West End of London. The piece was then just three decades old and its composer was still a regular visitor to our shores. If memory serves, he saw the Wonderful Town production in rehearsal and gave it his blessing. Now Lenny is long gone and the piece is almost twice as old. Times and tastes have changed.

It therefore came as an unexpected boon to learn that, thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, the Lowry in Salford and the Hallé Orchestra, UK audiences would at last enjoy a (brief) opportunity to hear Wonderful Town played by a full-sized symphony orchestra, whose conductor for these performances, Sir Mark Elder, describes it as ‘essentially a big string section with a big band – a Wagner orchestra that swings’. Elder is not the first classical conductor to fall for this charming, bluesy, seemingly inconsequential piece. Indeed, he himself discovered it thanks to a 1999 Prom performance conducted by Simon Rattle, which ended with the cast dancing a conga amongst the promenaders. The Salford audience was more muted, but there was no escaping the sense of occasion. This production, which is set to tour nationally with a much-reduced pit band, marks the return to action of Connie Fisher, the one-time Maria whose vocal disorder required radical treatment, resulting in a voice saved for the nation but significantly lowered. Somewhat incongruously playing Ruth, supposedly much the dowdier of two sisters from Ohio who elect to try their luck in the Big Apple, she acts, sings and dances with great élan and there is no mistaking repeated evidence of a gift that is surely innate, not learned – sublime comic timing.

This is also an orchestra on form and it shows, though the acoustic at the Lowry could have been more favourable and the players did not always ‘swing’ as they might ideally have done. This could be a very different show once a theatrical pit band has taken over from its more illustrious, classical colleagues. However, to hear these great, sentimental numbers accompanied by the Hallé strings serves to underline, as Mark Elder said to me after the show, that West Side Story may have marked the high point of Lenny’s creativity as a composer, but by no means summated it. In Wonderful Town no one dies, no one falls prey to racial intolerance and no family or community is rent asunder. Nonetheless, beneath the parodies and stereotypes – the grasping Greek landlord, the crooning “Oirish” policemen, the half-witted football star and the hard-bitten journalist – is a depth of human understanding and compassion that never eluded Leonard Bernstein and his dear friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green. This piece is fun and uplifting, but it is rarely, if ever, shallow.

Yet something intangible was missing. It is possible the presence of a fine symphony orchestra in the pit proved intimidating, for there was arguably too much emphasis on the music. It’s an old cliché, but the director, Royal Exchange veteran Braham Murray, perhaps needed to invest more in the text. There is a common assumption that musical comedies need to have every possible laugh squeezed out of them, but that is a fallacy. They need to breathe and ebb and flow, like all other theatre. A rare piece of footage, of Maureen Lipman performing the conga at the end of the first act (recorded at the Olivier Awards and available on YouTube) vividly demonstrates the contrast between the two productions. Ms Lipman, as well as singing better than I had remembered, proves to be quite the ‘hoofer’, leading the ensemble superbly. With its vigorous, inventive choreography and musicians who really understood the idiom, that production truly took off. 

I attended the new production with Nicholas Robinson, a friend who is a fine performer and producer of musical theatre and, at the end of our evening in the Lowry, we both left wondering whether an entirely new approach to this piece might now pay rich dividends. Thinking back, Simon Rattle’s concert performance at the Proms in 1999 was certainly camp and joyous and full of wild abandon, but it was also completely incoherent, shorn of dialogue with the performers simply revelling away from one outlandish number to the next, without a word of explanation. What struck us both was that, in this Salford performance, despite all the dialogue and the stage action unfolding there in front of us, the narrative was still nigh-impossible to follow and, well, very, very dated and, frankly, a little bit twee. Perhaps Lenny and his two collaborators were simply too familiar with each other, too mutually adoring and too rooted in the New York City they knew and loved, which had brought them together and imbued them with all their joie de vivre? Certainly, they were too close to their archetypes – the tumultuous melting pot of 1930s Greenwich Village, recaptured in an affectionate but also rather two-dimensional and stilted fashion through the benign, pre-McCarthyite prism of the early 1950s. At the end of this show, most of the audience were once again little the wiser about what had actually happened, and why.

Both Candide and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – previously blots on Leonard Bernstein’s largely unblemished record of leaping from one musical triumph after another – had been encumbered by laborious books. Both have been redeemed – triumphantly in the former case, only partially but nonetheless convincingly in the latter – by means of paring down the dialogue to virtually non-existence and replacing it with a witty, brisk, explanatory narration. Operas-operettas-musical theatre pieces bubbling over with ideas and tunes, but encumbered with a baneful and well-merited reputation for being all but impossible to produce in the theatre, have been radically reinvented and superseded by impressive works refashioned for the concert hall. Perhaps it’s time for someone to spare us the anachronistic, all-too-knowing and wearisomely sassy dialogue of Wonderful Town, largely incomprehensible today to all but aficionados, and replace it with a brisk, witty narration? If the Bernstein Foundation is interested, a suitable narration is forming in our heads already…