Miss Lonelyhearts

Nathanael West shed the high modernism of “Miss Lonelyhearts” for the more cinematic bleakness of “The Day of the Locust.”

Ferrell’s title, “Dear Miss Metropolitan,” summons to mind the dark comedy of Nathanael West’s 1933 advice-column novel, “Miss Lonelyhearts.”

There’s the blond “bikini bombshell” – “Miss Torso”, he calls her – who stretches and twirls in her underwear while she butters her breakfast toast; Mr Thorwald, the costume jewellery salesman, who tends a flower garden and a sick, unhappy wife; “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a single woman who pantomimes a candlelit dinner for two before she drinks and cries herself to sleep; and other nameless neighbours who are less intriguing but still worth watching.

If the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District conjures images of “Rear Window,” with its charming Village courtyard peopled with composers, photographers, married couples and Miss Lonelyhearts, it’s with good reason: Production designers for that 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film reportedly visited the place before creating the grand Hollywood set where it was filmed.

The sheer density of these giggle-inducing, collect-them-all punch lines gooses the show’s more harrowing themes, as if Nathanael West had written “Miss Lonelyhearts” in puffy glitter ink.