New Girl in Town by George Abbott (review)

The 1956–57 New York theater season was particularly noteworthy for Eugene O’Neill. Just three years after his death, Long Day’s Journey Into Night collected most of the season’s theater awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Revivals of The Iceman Cometh, which had opened off-Broadway in May 1956, and A Moon for the Misbegotten helped rescue O’Neill’s diminishing reputation from further decline through acclaimed productions of plays that had been victims of mixed reviews a decade earlier. The year-long O’Neill resurgence continued into the final weeks of the theater season when, on May 4, 1957, “Anna Christie” (1922) was reintroduced to audiences at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater as New Girl in Town, with a libretto by George Abbott, music and lyrics by Bob Merrill, and Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon as the show’s singing and dancing star.

Fifty-five years later, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s modest production of New Girl in Town, directed by Charlotte Moore, tested the musical’s durability without the trappings of a Broadway spectacle or the presence of a Broadway luminary. Opening July 18, 2012, for a seven-week run in the Irish Rep’s small theater on West 22nd Street, this New Girl in Town, only the third New York City production in the show’s history, offered fleeting glimpses of what O’Neill achieved in “Anna Christie.” The formulaic banality of Abbott’s libretto encumbered Moore’s laudable effort at almost every turn, and her cast of accomplished singers and dancers never quite shook off the musical comedy stereotypes imposed by Merrill’s score.

New Girl in Town moves all of “Anna Christie” to the New York City waterfront. In this setting, Chris Christopherson no longer characterizes fate as “Dat ole davil sea,” and the absence of the barge captain’s phrase, repeated like a curse throughout “Anna Christie,” signals a retreat from a mythic journey shaped by forces as powerful and incomprehensible as the sea. In its place is a reassuring clarity that culminates in an unambiguously happy ending as a newly reformed Marthy leads a marching band of teetotalers across the stage. In New Girl in Town, the fog out of which O’Neill has Mat Burke appear like a sea god to behold Anna as a mermaid in a dream has lifted, replaced by the light of day to which the musical pays tribute in the song “Sunshine Girl.” The original musical also reset the time of O’Neill’s play from the 1920s to the turn of the century, an era that generated a potpourri of musical styles from which Merrill borrowed. Ragtime, barbershop quartets, a rousing march with echoes of John Phillip Sousa, and a waltz in the Viennese style give the score of New Girl in Town versatility. Yet neither the music nor the lyrics—with the exception of Mat and Anna’s haunting duet, “Did You Close Your Eyes?”—seems to capture the tone and mysterious rhythm of “Anna Christie.”

Fig. 1.

The ensemble in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of New Girl in Town. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

More George Abbott than O’Neill, New Girl in Town nonetheless adds to the Irish Rep’s laudable record of staging O’Neill, including a 2008 revival of Take Me Along, the musical adaptation of Ah, Wilderness!. Moore and her collaborators—the expert musical director John Bell and the ceaselessly inventive choreographer Barry McNabb—seem to have taken their cue from the Equity Library Theater’s 1975 revival, which was performed by a cast of eight. This New Girl in Town featured an ensemble of three women and four men who played various roles as well as sang and danced with acrobatic flair on the Irish Rep’s tiny stage. Moore restored the action of New Girl in Town to...