TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/122589/12258900.036

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 4KB | 72 lines

THEATER, Page 92

Hello Again to the Long Goodbye


    CITY OF ANGELS
    Music by Cy Coleman; Lyrics by David Zippel
    Book by Larry Gelbart

    The ballad throbs to a climax, the two singers look at each
other in a confession of mutual need, and the title line of
mock-bragging devotion, You're Nothing Without Me, reverberates
from the rafters. All in all, a classic first-act finale -- except
that in this musical the characters who vow undying fidelity are
a nerdy novelist turned screenwriter and the hard-boiled detective
he has created on page and celluloid.

    That quirky, funny, oddly thrilling moment epitomizes the
twofold cleverness of City of Angels, which opened on Broadway last
week. The show pays honest homage to the pop-culture traditions of
stage, cinema, radio and recording studio (especially those of the
'40s, when it is set), yet brings them together in a fashion that
feels fresh and new. Nostalgia plus novelty is a notoriously
volatile cocktail, but Angels has the impeccably elegant fizz of
champagne.

    Perhaps its most remarkable attainment is that the premise and
structure, which sound inordinately egghead when described, are
easy to grasp in performance. The action begins with the detective
(James Naughton), a rumpled knight of the tenderloin who lives by
a code of honor in a world of thugs and well-heeled thieves.
Moments later the story shifts to the office (coyly labeled a
"cell") where his creator labors as a hireling of a movie tycoon
more crass, smug and fascinatingly awful than any envisioned by
Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law
(no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the
moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his
scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action
causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward, as if a
film were being rewound, until they are back in position to perform
the new bowdlerized version.

    As the script unfolds, it becomes clear that the characters in
the detective plot are all based on the people around the writer
at the studio -- indeed, the same actors play both sets of roles.
This connection leads to countless comic effects. In the
splashiest, the perennially disappointed "other woman" (Randy
Graff) of both plot lines switches characters, costumes and locales
in mid-song, all without missing a beat of her ferociously funny
lament, You Can Always Count on Me.

    The detective plot borrows classic elements from the likes of
The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye: a missing girl (Rachel York)
who turns up, clad only in a sheet and beckoning for comfort, on
the detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm
old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the
detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering
more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the
faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches
without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the
story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed
satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about
the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed by the wit and
humanity of David Zippel's lyrics and the zip of Cy Coleman's
score, which delights in the past without sinking to pastiche
except, maybe, in the close-harmony numbers of a group resembling
the Modernaires.

    City of Angels is that rarest of things on Broadway these days,
a completely original American musical, not imported, not adapted
from something else and not a recycling of bygone songs. Coming at
the end of a decade of almost nonstop doomsaying, it proves that
Broadway's signature style of show is, in the right hands, as
viable and valuable as ever.