Smile: Arnaz Is Back in ‘Town’

If you missed the 1997 Reprise! concert version of “Wonderful Town,” don’t fret. Fret not. Fretting will get you nowhere. Besides: A somewhat augmented remounting of the show is hereabout.

The Music Theatre of Southern California’s production of the 1953 musical comedy stars Lucie Arnaz in the Rosalind Russell role. She does very nicely. Arnaz is a throwback in the best sense, a pro with the sort of audience rapport most performers couldn’t buy with a fistful of cash.

Arnaz appeared in the ’97 Reprise! edition, which a year later popped up at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Now, with a new female co-star (Kate Dawson, replacing Stephanie Zimbalist), “Wonderful Town” has embarked on a tour of San Gabriel and Glendale. Its producers have expressed hopes for a move elsewhere, possibly to Broadway.

The Gotham hopes are inflated at this point. It’s too modest an enterprise, and even with a relaxed and funny lead in Arnaz, there’s a Civic Light Opera air of pretty-goodness in the results.

Yet modesty is fine for this material. On its own terms, this “Wonderful Town” provides a fond look back at 1930s Greenwich Village, Betty Comden and Adolph Green style, as accompanied by the excitable, caffeinated rhythms of Leonard Bernstein.

Lyricists Comden and Green and composer Bernstein cranked out the score in four weeks. (The book is by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, who wrote the source material, the play “My Sister Eileen.”) By a decade, “Wonderful Town” followed Bernstein, Comden and Green’s premier collaboration, “On the Town.”

They’re of a piece, along with the later Comden and Green Big Apple valentine, “Bells Are Ringing.” In Comden and Green parlance, New York City is an urban Illyria, bubbling over with ethnic eccentrics, alive with romance.

“Wonderful Town” follows the fortunes of Ruth (Arnaz), sensible and smart and not exotic, and her dishy sister Eileen (Dawson). Ruth wants to be a writer, Eileen an actress. Book editor Bob Baker (Cliff Bemis, the International House of Pancakes spokesguy and Reprise! alum) has the warms for Eileen, but Eileen makes him realize he’s really in love with Ruth.

The show has its loping charms, the quirky, memorable homesickness duet “Ohio” chief among them. So does the production, restaged by Don Amendolia. Though they’re not helped by an excess of unfunny hamming in the second tier, Arnaz and Dawson keep us engaged. Bemis has a fervent way with the ballad “It’s Love.” And as the world’s dullest drugstore manager, Joe Joyce is a gem. (Officer, I’d like to report some stolen scenes. . . .)

For many of us who grew up a world and a half away, Manhattan according to Comden and Green provides enough to develop a lifelong crush on the place.

“Wonderful Town” isn’t a top-shelf musical--never was. But its depiction of (strictly heterosexual) Depression-era Village bohemianism makes you smile, quaint cornball jokes and all. There should always be a place for shows like this, dated and flawed though they are. Especially if they’re inhabited by musical comedy practitioners on the order of Lucie Arnaz.

* “Wonderful Town,” Music Theatre of Southern California. At the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, 320 S. Mission Drive, San Gabriel: Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 24. $20-$42. (626) 308-2868.

At the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale: Oct. 29, 8 p.m.; Oct. 30, 2 and 8 p.m.; Oct. 31, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 31. $22-$42. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Stephen Simon: Guide/Fletcher

Tony Abatemarco: Appopolous

Randy Doney: Lonigan

Jennie Fahn: Helen

Andy Rice: Wreck

Melissa Matthews: Violet

Daniel Guzman: Valenti

Kate Dawson: Eileen Sherwood

Lucie Arnaz: Ruth Sherwood

Cliff Bemis: Robert Baker

Catherine Best: Mrs. Wade

Joe Joyce: Frank Lippencott

Kristofer Soul: Chick Clark

Book by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov. Music by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Directed by Don Amendolia. Choreography by Kevin Carlisle. Musical director Richard Allen. Set by David Sackeroff. Costumes by David R. Zyla. Lighting by Raun Yankovich. Production stage manager Rick Kleber.