WONDERFUL TOWN is a musical comedy about the adventures of two sisters from Ohio who come to New York City in search of careers. Its plot, originally a series of separate short stories, has turned up in a book, a non-musical play, two movies, a radio serial, and finally, in its most famous form, as a big Broadway musical.

These adventures of the two sisters were based on true life experiences that occurred to Ruth and Eileen McKenney, who came to New York from Columbus, Ohio, in 1933. This was when the route of the Independent Subway was being dug and dynamited through Manhattan’s rocky foundations, and so explosions were heard under miles of New York streets all through the day and night as depicted in the musical WONDERFUL TOWN.

Ruth McKenney was a hopeful newspaper and magazine writer, and began to write the reminiscences of her first year in New York with her sister Eileen at the suggestion of an editor of the New Yorker Magazine, who had rejected some of her other stories. These New Yorker stories were so popular that they were collected in a book that McKenney entitled, “My Sister Eileen.”

Playwrights Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov had the brilliant idea of making a play out of her book and keeping its title, My Sister Eileen. This comedy became a big hit, opening December 26, 1940, and running for 866 performances. Therefore, it became, at the time, one of the longest running plays in Broadway history. Shirley Booth (TV’s “Hazel”) played Ruth in that production. The play was equally successful in London and on a U.S. national tour.

The plot was made into movies of the same title twice and was used as the basis of a radio series during the 1940s. In 1953, Broadway producer Robert Fryer and legendary director George Abbott also thought McKenney’s stories and the Fields/Chodorov play would make a fine musical comedy. Fields and Chodorov agreed to write the book and, after another composer and lyricist didn’t work out, at the last minute, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green agreed to write the score.

The first performance of WONDERFUL TOWN was in New Haven, Conn., January 19, 1953, and after further try-out performances, the show opened in New York on February 25, 1953, where it ran 559 performances until July 3, 1954. It won the N.Y. Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Tony Award for best musical of the 1952-53 season.

The new Broadway production of WONDERFUL TOWN opened on November 23, 2003 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre to great critical acclaim.