One of the great American musicals, Wonderful Town, is playing at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), and it is pure pleasure. With an intelligent, heartfelt script and genuinely appealing characters, this musical is perfectly suited for a repertory company whose members act as well as they sing and dance.

The show takes us to Greenwich Village, 1935, where Ruth Sherwood and her younger sister Eileen have just arrived from small-town Ohio to seek their fortunes – Ruth as a writer, Eileen as a singer and actress. Fresh off the train, they wander into lively, colorful Christopher Street, take a noisy basement apartment (a new subway is being blasted down below), meet the neighbors, and start looking for work.

Will the clever Ruth (Lisa Horner) learn how to write in her own voice? Will she ever sell her stories? Will Ruth (dateless back in Ohio) find love in Manhattan? If I had any quarrel with the casting of Wonderful Town, it would be with the director’s futile attempt to pass off the appealing, long-legged Lisa Horner as an old maid. Her sassy number “One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man” is one of the many highlights of this show.

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