On The Town was Leonard Bernstein's first Broadway show, which opened in December 1944. He called it a musical comedy; the story of three sailors on 24-hour shore leave experiencing New York for the first time and looking for love and adventure.
It was developed out of the ballet Fancy Free, which he had written earlier the same year for Jerome Robbins. Adolph Green and Betty Comden were recruited to provide the lyrics, and the show was a huge success.
Now, though, it is best known through the film version with Gene Kelly, made five years after the premiere.
But that has a very different score from the original, and for the three Festival Hall performances, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Paul Daniel conducting, On the Town was being heard as Bernstein originally intended, complete with the strange little intermission song and the ballet sequences (which the composer later turned into a self-standing concert work) as well as the enduring numbers like New York, New York, and Lonely Town. There was no dancing at the Festival Hall. This was a semi-staging, and a very effective one, devised by Annilese Miskimmon, with lighting effects, costumes, and all the necessary exits and entrances, and Daniel made it fizz along.
The cast was an excellent one too. The three sailors, Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie, were sung and acted by Brent Barrett, Graham Bickley and Karl Dymond with exactly the right kind of boyish, gauche enthusiasm, and Barrett especially treated his two solo numbers, the most beautiful in the score, with all the refinement they deserve.
The remarkable Kim Criswell was Hildy Esterhazy, the extrovert cabbie desperate for male company. Her panache seemed effortless. But Sally Burgess as Claire de Loone, the nymphomaniac anthropologist, and Daniel Washington as her long-suffering fiancé Pitkin W Bridgework, took their numbers with equal zest, while Lilian Watson sparkled as Ivy Smith, the target of Gabey's affections.
It was just a pity that her part is small and we didn't get to see more of her. Julia Mckenzie turned in a fabulous cameo as the grotesque singing teacher Madame Maude P Dilly and shared the narration with Ned Sherrin. London Voices supplied the chorus. Great stuff; only the fierceness of the amplification sometimes seemed overbearing.
