Will ‘Town’ Be Wonderful Enough for Broadway?

The latest Broadway tryout town: San Gabriel.

That’s where a revival of “Wonderful Town” with Broadway ambitions will open Friday, in San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, as part of the Music Theatre of Southern California season. After three weekends in San Gabriel, it will move to the Alex Theatre in Glendale for a weekend, also under the Music Theatre banner, and then . . . well, it depends on who sees it in those two venues, how they like it, and what their time frame is.

The star is Lucie Arnaz. The production is based on a revival that opened in Westwood in 1997 as part of the Reprise! series of semi-staged musicals. That version and a subsequent brief run in 1998 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center featured Arnaz and Stephanie Zimbalist as the two sisters who come to ‘50s New York from Ohio.

Kevin Carlisle, who choreographed that production, thought it worked surprisingly well in Orange County, even though the hall is about six times larger than the Reprise! revival’s original home at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. He decided to try to take it to New York.

Arnaz, who was a replacement for Tyne Daly in the original Reprise! production, wasn’t hard to persuade--she is “totally committed,” Carlisle said. But as he approached possible backers or co-producers, he found that while “they all love Lucie right away, a lot of them confused the show with ‘On the Town,’ ” another show from the same musical team: composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Unfortunately, “On the Town” just went through an unsuccessful New York revival.

For the record, “Wonderful Town” was first produced in 1953, nine years after “On the Town.” It’s based on the play “My Sister Eileen,” which was adapted by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov from stories by Ruth McKinney.

The production in San Gabriel and Glendale will continue the Reprise! tradition of keeping the orchestra on the stage--10 instrumentalists, in this case. Carlisle noted that the recent revival of “Chicago,” which grew out of a similar semi-staged production, used the same technique, to wide acclaim.

The production also will feature nine other actors from the Reprise! version, including the male lead Cliff Bemis, again under the direction of Don Amendolia. But there are a few differences. Kate Dawson is taking over the Eileen role from Zimbalist, and the new sets will be somewhat more extensive.

A parade of representatives from Broadway and from larger resident theaters will check out the production, Carlisle said; Comden is also expected. Carlisle has “a gentleman’s agreement” that Reprise! will get a small percentage of the proceeds from any future commercial production.