Director Zhailon Levingston’s Wonderful World

An interview by Brittani Samuel

Despite the title, the Manhattan that Ruth and Eileen Sherwood first encounter isn’t particularly wonderful. The Ohio sisters land in Greenwich Village full of hope, only to find noisy fights and plenty of offbeat neighbors. That’s the sobering irony of Wonderful Town—Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green’s 1953 musical comedy. By the end of the opening number, “Christopher Street,” the artistic utopia the sisters dreamed of seems more chaotic than charmed.

Still, Wonderful Town has cast a spell over certain Golden Age musical lovers for ages. What it lacks in familiarity when compared to other Bernstein works like West Side Story and On the Town, it makes up for with genuine humor, heart, and an eclectic range of music styles.

No one knows this more than the creative producers of Encores! In fact, City Center has hosted the show three other times throughout the Golden Age era, and once in 2000 as a part of Encores! Now, 25 years later, Wonderful Town returns with an enthusiastic production directed by Obie Award winner Zhailon Levingston. When Artistic Director Lear deBessonet and Producing Creative Director Clint Ramos approached Levingston to take on a staging of the show, he saw more than nostalgia. He saw an opportunity to recontextualize this underdog of a classic, proving to 2025 audiences that the show holds up even with a widened lens.

Encores! Wonderful Town director Zhailon Levingston

Levingston’s production invites the full, multiethnic spectrum of New Yorkers who have made this town “wonderful” all along. “It became fascinating to think about a time in Greenwich Village that was more diverse and complicated than it is today,” Levingston tells me. “What does it mean to show a neighborhood of New York that, to me, is more interesting then, than it is even now? And is that a way of bringing people closer to this Golden Age material?”

The history is certainly there to support Levingston’s vision. “Something we learned during the research process is that the NAACP was founded and built their first headquarters in Greenwich Village. One of James Baldwin’s mentors was Beauford Delaney, a modernist painter who lived and worked out of Greenwich Village. It’s interesting to think about what was going on during that time. In fact, the more diverse the cast is, the more we're actually telling an accurate story.”

The cast of Wonderful Town

There are emotional ripple effects for the characters of course, particularly for aspiring writer Ruth and hopeful actress Eileen, played by Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson, respectively. Casting Black women lends different stakes to the sisters’ flight from Ohio to seemingly bohemian New York. Levingston shared the work of author-editor Dorothy West and trailblazing actress Rosetta LeNoire with Rose and Jackson as touchpoints to illuminate who the Sherwoods might have been inspired by. In Levingston’s words, he was also just “really interested to see the story of two Black women pursuing their dreams.” The influence of race is certainly present here, but it isn’t the only factor defining Ruth and Eileen’s adventure in New York. “Ultimately, their reason for being is their individual ambitions. In some ways, that still feels like a rare way of telling Black women’s stories.”

Experiencing Rose and Jackson’s interpretation of Bernstein’s music also felt like a rare treasure. He was familiar with earworms like the beautiful, bewailing duet, “Ohio,” but the score in its entirety both delighted and intimidated him at first listen. “Abject fear, that’s usually my way into a piece,” he laughs. “If I'm not sure how I would make it work, that’s probably the first clue that it's something I’m interested in.”

To match the music’s pulse, he turned to movement. “I’m excited about the way choreography is attacking the score. Lorin Latarro (choreographer) and Ayodele Casel (tap choreographer) are working closely together to create an authentic vocabulary that really expresses the time period the show takes place in, 1930s New York.” For these collaborators, that also means adding tap sequences to the show—an exciting rhythmic integration alongside the original orchestrations in this revival.

Encores! Wonderful Town director Zhailon Levingston

Ultimately, there will be plenty old and new to love about this Wonderful Town. Just as there is plenty old and new to love about the kaleidoscopic city at the center of it. 

“There’s something to the tenacity of those who come here, and what they overcome. The overcoming of the city ends up being just as important as the ideal of the city itself. One of the last songs in the show is ‘The Wrong Note Rag,’ and I’ve been saying that being in New York is about showing up to this quote-unquote ‘wonderful’ town, and then realizing that for a while it’s really a ‘wrong note rag.’ But if you play it right, then you actually get to the other side of something that is more than you probably dreamed.”

Brittani Samuel is an arts journalist, theater critic, and the co-editor of the Obie Award-winning digital publication, 3Views on Theater.