It's nonstop laughs aboard the Twentieth Century, a luxury train traveling from Chicago to New York City. Luck, love and mischief collide when the bankrupt theater producer Oscar Jaffee (Golden Globe winner Peter Gallagher) embarks on a madcap mission to cajole glamorous Hollywood starlet Lily Garland (Tony and Emmy Award winner Kristin Chenoweth) into playing the lead in his new, non-existent epic drama. But is the train ride long enough to reignite the spark between these former lovers, create a play from scratch, and find the money to get it all the way to Broadway?
Theatergoers get pretty passionate about Cy Coleman's score. I'm not one of them-this isn't really one of those shows with songs that you leave the theater humming. That said, a slew of polished comic turns and some stellar staging make it a shrewd move to hop aboard this train.
There are a million big reasons that On the Twentieth Century, the 1978 musical by Cy Coleman and Comden and Green, shouldn't work today: It's profoundly silly, tonally tricky, too big for the market, and a very hard sing. Indeed, the Roundabout's delicious revival at the American Airlines crashes intermittently into most of those problems. But there's nevertheless one small reason - about four-foot-eleven - it works anyway: Kristin Chenoweth. She is a comic genius in a role ideally suited to her gifts.
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