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?
The 1976 Broadway musical by Cy Coleman, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green needs stars to reach full locomotion speed. And the current Broadway revival, which opened Sunday at the American Airlines Theatre, has at least one in tip-top form, Kristin Chenoweth.
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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