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NEW YORK -- When you wait half a century to see a show, learning it by its published text, its 1953 Broadway cast album and by watching a museum tape of a late '50s live telecast, expectations run high, if warily.

How can such a show live up?

So it was, approaching "Wonderful Town," a musical neglected for decades by the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera but which finally is being given its first major reincarnation on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, which is the old Martin Beck, renamed six months ago.

The production germinated with a five-performance run three years ago in City Center's Encores! series, directed and choreographed by former Pittsburgher Kathleen Marshall.

The new Broadway production is not only the latest to be choreographed by Marshall but the first she has directed en toto as well.

Despite the short notice on which this "Wonderful Town" was announced and opened, and the leading lady's flu during a troubled month of previews, the production bursts with a contagious affection for New York, albeit a highly idealized one of Greenwich Village in 1935.

There isn't a better-sounding show in town, thanks to musical director Rob Fisher's respectfully accurate re-creations of Don Walker's original orchestrations.

The score by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green is one of the unsung emeralds of theater -- a jubilant, wistful, jazzy palette of songs depicting the exhilirating, scary differences between one's hometown and daunting Manhattan.

It was for the New Yorker -- here called the Manhatter -- that Ruth McKenney first wrote of how she and beautiful sister Eileen arrived from Columbus, Ohio, and rented a garden apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Bohemian capital of artists, writers and showbiz aspirants.

Ruth's stories evolved into the Joseph Fields-Jerome Chodorov play "My Sister Eileen," which became a 1942 film with Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair and eventually the musical "Wonderful Town" with Russell (later Carol Channing) and Edie Adams.

When Columbia Pictures honcho Harry Cohn, who owned the film rights to the story, refused to pay Bernstein, Comden and Green their price for the song score, Cohn commissioned a new one for his 1955 remake of "My Sister Eileen" with Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh and new kids Jack Lemmon and Bob Fosse.

It doesn't seem possible not to fall "A Little Bit in Love" with the McKenney sisters, renamed the Sherwoods in the show, as they meet a gallery of entertaining eccentrics and hopefuls. The sisters, wondering what they've gotten into, cradle each other, singing, "Why oh why oh why oh, why did we ever leave Ohio?"

One might have reservations about a show that uses about two-thirds of the stage to house a larger-than-ordinary orchestra, reducing the actors' space to maybe 10 feet of depth between the conductor and the stage apron.

But in this case, it's a way to feature as much as practical the second of three Manhattan-based Bernstein scores -- between "On the Town" and "West Side Story" -- which in turn gives full orchestral measure to several of Marshall's most exquisitely staged numbers, "Christopher Street," "Conga!," "Swing," Ballet at the Village Vortex and "Wrong Note Rag."

John Lee Beatty's sets, somewhat confined to skylines and a narrow ribbon of space downstage, ably suggest the congestion of the sleepless city.

All this and a marvelous cast, beginning with two-time Tony Award-winner Donna Murphy ("Passion," "The King and I"), who is all things Ruth -- brilliant, clipped, protective, pragmatic and hilariously sardonic.

Murphy, exhibiting a heretofore hidden arsenal of comic grace, is a less brassy Ruth than Roz Russell, which is the biggest single interpretive shift from the original to the radiant new "Wonderful Town."

The strongest of Murphy's supporters are Jennifer Westfeldt as the comely Eileen, Michael McGrath as the predatory newspaper reporter Chick, Peter Benson as the earnest Frank from Woolworth's soda fountain, Nancy Anderson as the sisters' neighbor Helen and Raymond Jaramillo McLeod as the jock Wreck, who remembers glory days when he'd "Pass-s-s-s That Football."

David Ives has done a script adaptation that suggests aspects of the village you wouldn't have found on Broadway in '53, but "Wonderful Town" is close enough to being revisionist-free. It's like a visit home without ever have been there before.

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