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much faith in him as the music men do.
10. VINCENT SARDI, RESTAURATEUR
    Vincent Sardi opened his first restaurant in 1921, on West 44th Street, right in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. The family moved the restaurant to its currentlocation, 234 West 44th, in 1927. Since then, Sardi’s Restaurant has been synonymous with Broadway. From opening nights to the caricatures on the wall to the upstairs bar, Sardi’s is as colorful as Broadway itself.
    Vincent Sardi was a Sicilian kid from Queens who opened his restaurant in the middle of the Jazz Age, although it was never a speakeasy. His restaurant’s popularity with a certain crowd of first-nighters, who all had their own tables, cemented the “Opening Night at Sardi’s” tradition. He was honored at the very first Tony ceremony in 1947, and stars still ache to be caricatured and put up on the walls of this New York institution.

It’s a Hell of a Town
10 Fun City Musicals
    New York’s legendary Main Stem, Broadway has long been the rainbow’s end for musical theater, hence the not-quite omnibus title of this book. Here are ten shows devoted to that magical talisman, the city on the Hudson.
1.
WONDERFUL TOWN
    The great songwriters Leonard Bernstein (the music) and Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the words) either together or separately wrote several musical paeans to New York. These titles are a quick trip through musical greatness:
West Side Story, Bells are Ringing,
and their first show together,
On The Town.
    Wonderful Town,
scored by the three, gets the nod here as an almost perfect example of the musical-comedy genre and a perfect love letter to New York. A superb adaptation of the play
My Sister Eileen, Wonderful Town
tells the story of the Sherwood sisters, bookish Ruth and gorgeous Eileen, who have journeyed east from Columbus, Ohio, to 1935 Greenwich Village in search of fame, fortune, and fellas. Written in an unheard-offive weeks, the show featured a fine score and an unmatched star performance by Rosalind Russell as would-be writer Ruth.
2.
RAGTIME
    The show that many call the last great musical of the twentieth century,
Ragtime
is a sweeping adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow’ novel of the same name, and is structured similarly. Doctorow’s typical epic sweep, combining ordinary people and the famous folk with which they interact, is cleverly adapted into musical form by librettist Terrence McNally, composer Stephen Flaherty, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens.
    The tony, all-white suburb of New Rochelle, home to an affluent white family, is invaded by the real world, i.e., racism, humanity, inhumanity, and other people. Whites, blacks, immigrants, and their mutual experiences, creating the tapestry of Americana at the beginning of the twentieth century, are handled with superb taste and style in this grade-A adaptation.
3.
SWEET CHARITY
    Say “Broadway author” in a word association test and nine out of ten will answer “Neil Simon.” Check. And does any Broadway composer say “New York City” more than Cy Coleman? No. Check, again. So they collaborated on a musical (with the smarty-pants lyricist Dorothy Fields) and created a sweet New York cocktail (a Manhattan?) called
Sweet Charity.
    Adapted from the Fellini film
Nights of Cabiria,
Charity is a big-hearted dance-hall girl who loves neither wisely nor well. She hooks up with all manner of New York types, from a swingin’ playboy to a nerdy corporate schlub. Her adventures include a downtownrave-up (“Rhythm of Life), presided over by Big Daddy Johann Sebastian Brubeck, and a parade through the city streets (“I’m a Brass Band”).
4.
SATURDAY NIGHT
    Stephen Sondheim’s first Broadway musical would have been
Saturday Night,
with a book by Julius J. Epstein, adapted from Epstein’s play (co-written with his brother Philip)
Front Porch in Flatbush
. Unfortunately, producer Lem Ayers died in 1952, and the production stalled. Following an abortive attempt to resuscitate the show in