Theatre Register

Wonderful Town, 1953

Shows · Wonderful Town · Winter Garden Theatre, 1953

We hold no picture of this staging. This one is filed against Wonderful Town and could document any of its runs. None
Original BroadwayWinter Garden Theatre 559 performances1 Tony Awards

The run closed July 3, 1954

Opened
February 25, 1953
Closed
July 3, 1954
Performances
559
Previews
Theatre
Winter Garden Theatre

Of the 705 productions we hold that opened in the 1950s and record a performance count, this is the 41st longest. That is a rank within what we hold, not within everything that was staged.

Other stagings of Wonderful Town 2 more that season

1986 Transfer Transfer
2003 Revival Revival · Kathleen Marshall 497 perf.

Who was in it55 named

Edith Adams
Delbert Anderson
Ed Balin
Maxine Berke
Margaret Caddy
Geraldine Delaney
Jean Eliot
Warren Galjour
Edward J Heim
Isabella Hoopes
Pat Johnson
Walter Kelvin
Robert Kole
Albert Linville
David Lober
Victor Moreno
Evelyn Page
Lee Papell
Helen Rice
Chris Robinson
Helena Seroy
William Weslow
Patty Wilkes
Donald Barton
Ruth Anne Fleming
Babs Heath
Diana Herbert
Ray Kirchner
Hugh Lambert
Marion Lauer
Paul Lyday
Mike Mason
David Neuman
Virginia Poe
Eva Ralf
Jean Sincere
Doris Wright

21 of these 55 names have a person record behind them and link to one. The other 34 are set from the identifier in the cast list, which is a slug of the name — so hyphens and full stops are lost and a few come out wrong. We hold nothing else about them. Nobody here is matched to a character: the cast list records who was in the company and not what they played.

Characters9 roles recorded

Rosalind Russell Ruth Sherwood
Jacquelyn McKeever Eileen Sherwood
Jerry Lanning Robert Baker
Ralston Hill Frank Lippencott
Gabriel Dell Chick Clark
Joseph Buloff Appopolous
? Speedy Valenti
? Wreck
Michele Burke Helen

Only 512 of 13,459 productions carry role names, and these came out of a wiki table — the names arrived with the table's own cell markup on them and have been stripped back. They are not linked to person records because the identifiers in that table do not resolve to ours.

Creative team

Director
George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Uncredited
Choreographer
Donald Saddler
Producer
Robert Fryer

A producer is one string on this record, however many people or companies it names. Directors and choreographers are held both as text and as identifiers; where an identifier exists the name links to a page.

Tony Awards 1 from 1 nomination

Best Musical Won

Recordings 5 held for the work

None of these is attributed to this staging. They are filed against Wonderful Town, and nothing in the record says which production any of them documents. Closing that join is the point of this catalogue and it is not closed yet.

Around this production

\u201cThe Musical Comedy\u201d

“I said to Jonathan Tunick, ‘It says Don Walker. Don couldn’t do that.’ Jonathan said, ‘He didn’t.’”) By the early sixties, Walker was frequently working with Arnold Goland (Flora, the Red Menace, Fiddler on the Roof) and Jim Tyler (Cabaret, The Happy Time). When new songs (as opposed to incidentals and fixes) came in,…

Speaker not recorded. The Sound of Broadway Music A Book of Orchestrators and Steven Suskin Oxford Uni, p. 130
  • Donald Saddler won two Tony Awards for his choreography for Wonderful Town (1953) and the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette. Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals the Dan Dietz, p. 22
  • As Gaynes, he created the role of Robert Baker in the 1953 production of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green’s Wonderful Town , and introduced “A Quiet Girl” and, with Edie Adams, the duet “It’s Love.” Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals the Dan Dietz, p. 37
  • A few weeks before the original production of Wonderful Town went into rehearsal, the show’s lyricist Arnold B. Horwitt and composer Leroy Anderson left the musical because of artistic differences with the librettists. Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals the Dan Dietz, p. 311
  • the March 1958 Wonderful Town was followed later in the year by the television adaptation; Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals the Dan Dietz, p. 533
  • As of this writing, Wonderful Town has been revived on Broadway five times, including three productions by the New York City Center Light Opera Company in 1958, 1963, and 1967 (for more information about the musical, see entry for the original 1953 production). Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals the Dan Dietz, p. 694

Passages naming this production, found by keyword across 178 books. Where it turns up in the literature, not curated notes about it.

What this page does not know

  • No photograph of this staging. 48 of 13,459 productions hold one.
  • Which of the 5 recordings of Wonderful Town document this run, if any.
  • Reviews, box office, running order, understudies and designers: none of it is held for any production.

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