TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.036

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 4KB | 75 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.