The Encores! series at New York City Center has revived so many classic musicals and underrated gems over the years. The latest production of Wonderful Town is a surprising disappointment, both because of the team’s incredible track record but also because Encores! famously presented a sterling revival of the Leonard Bernstein-scored show a quarter century ago that went on to great acclaim on Broadway with a memorable star turn by Donna Murphy. While Bernstein’s music still sounds magnificent played by a 28-piece orchestra under Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s baton, this version is a slow trudge through a series of clichés and unfortunate directorial choices.

It’s smart to break convention by casting the super-talented Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson as the aspiring-artist sisters who arrive in Depression-era New York City from their native Ohio, but why insert a new line for their Greenwich Village landlord (Daniel Torres) that nods to their Blackness (“I don’t care if your tan never goes away”) but then never address their race in any meaningful way afterward? After all, that might explain, and deepen, their struggle to get a break as a writer and actress in the big city of the 1930s. More glaringly, why cast the drop-dead gorgeous Rose as the supposedly mousy wannabe writer and then have multiple characters suggest in words and gestures that she’s an overweight slob who’s likely to end up as an unmarried spinster? Why outfit Jackson’s flirty ingenue in one of the ugliest dresses seen on stage in recent years (by Linda Cho), an outfit that seems to have been assembled out of scrap fabric in clashing colors? Why saddle one of the show’s only other Black leads (Fergie Philippe) with the part of the dim-witted football player — or introduce a scrum of potential suitors for the sisters who seem to top themselves in cartoonish inappropriateness?

It’s no wonder that entire rows of the theater cleared out at intermission on opening night. The overlong scenes based on Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s original book are dated and deadly dull, and the show only springs to life during production numbers that showcase the stars’ sterling vocals and some of Lorin Latarro’s choreography. But even these routines can be a muddle, awkwardly blending in tap elements (by Ayodele Casel) that never quite cohere into movement that matches Bernstein’s eclectic score — which savvily blends jazz and Latin American dance music to replicate the sonic melting pot of the city.

Director Zhailon Levingston, who worked wonders on last year’s ballroom reinvention of Cats, here seems to bumble the show’s biggest moments. The Act 1 finale, a whirlwind conga line that erupts on the Brooklyn Navy Pier, ends with a diffuse scattering of the ensemble into the auditorium and underplays the arrest of Jackson’s Eileen in near-darkness as the curtain drops — an event that sets up the entire second act but here gets literally lost in the shuffle.

The show gains some momentum in the zippier second act, which features a buoyant Irish-dance number (as Eileen is hilariously mistaken by the Irish American cops as one of their own) and the show’s signature ballad, “It’s Love,” which is well sung by Jackson and Javier Munoz (who catches the fancy of both sisters despite a lack of any discernible onstage chemistry with either). But by then, it’s too late to salvage a revival that seems like a dull and dated throwback best kept in the vault. ★★☆☆☆

WONDERFUL TOWN
Encores! at New York City Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through May 11 for $45 to $185