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- <text id=89TT3383>
- <title>
- Dec. 25, 1989: Hello Again To The Long Goodbye
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Dec. 25, 1989 Cruise Control:Tom Cruise
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THEATER, Page 92
- Hello Again to the Long Goodbye
- </hdr><body>
- <qt> <l>CITY OF ANGELS</l>
- <l>Music by Cy Coleman;</l>
- <l>Lyrics by David Zippel</l>
- <l>Book by Larry Gelbart</l>
- </qt>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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