Miss Fisher scores high despite her lower voice
WONDERFUL TOWN
The Lowry, Salford (and touring)
★★★★✩
TALENT show winner Connie Fisher is back from vocal surgery – less the trilling Miss Perfect of old, now with a deeper voice. It is not quite basso profundo but the song-thrush has turned into something more like an alto pigeon.
If she has lost musical reach and gained a couple of shiny apples for cheek pouches, she has also matured as an actress. You sense the audience willing her on as she shares the duties in Leonard Bernstein’s richly scored Wonderful Town.
Miss Fisher plays Ruth, an Ohio lass who has come to New York City with her prettier sister Eileen (Lucy van Gasse) to seek excitement and a fortune.
At first, in fact for most of the story, their quest goes horribly wrong. Ruth falls for handsome Bob (Michael Xavier, looking a little like former U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry) but he falls for sassy Eileen.
Eventually, right girl gets guy, allowing for the soupy It’s Love. That is the closest the show gets to traditional schmaltz.
With the Halle Orchestra on parade for the start of this run (a different band takes over for the tour on April 16), the music is a major draw.
Bernstein was too highbrow to do vulgar show tunes. Lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, likewise, opted for wit rather than cliche. Good for them. So we have songs in which ‘CIA’ is made to rhyme with ‘ Danny Kaye’, and ‘monkey glands’ with ‘hot dog stands’. You would not want to get those ingredients confused.
Things take a while to cook dramatically. The girls’ first song, Ohio, is a melancholy duet in which neither voice quite takes command. The show really needs an early belter of a ballad.
Miss Fisher shines at the self-effacing comedy – 100 Easy Ways To Lose A Man is an aw-shucks hit, and she has a terrific routine with some sailors. When she is alongside Miss van Gasse it is hard to be certain which performer is the senior British officer. Wonderful Town is interesting rather than bewitching. But you leave humming the tunes, happy to have good old Connie back on stage.