Uma Cidade em Cena: Wonderful Town e as Promessas do Sonho Americano

This article offers a critical reading of Wonderful Town (1953), a musical by Leonard Bernstein with a libretto by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, as a sophisticated and ironic commentary on the American Dream in the postwar era. Through an analysis of its score, libretto, and staging, the text examines how the work addresses issues of urban identity, gender, exclusion, and aspiration. New York City is portrayed as a living, sonorous, and contradictory organism, where the Sherwood sisters negotiate belonging and recognition through performance and solidarity. Jazz, operatic parody, and everyday theatricality function as dramaturgical tools that challenge the cultural and social norms of the time. The article highlights the role of comedy as a form of social critique and the musical’s function as a capsule of memory and a mode of critical listening. Wonderful Town thus emerges as a key Broadway work, combining theatrical playfulness with interpretive depth.