Detective comics

Brown’s playful City of Angels

October 24, 2007 11:15:08 AM

Tough guys and loose women populate the lighthearted musical City of Angels like tykes playing dress-up. Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin are staging the 1989 multiple Tony Award winner (through October 25) with energy and enthusiasm, turning the stage into a trampoline, under Lowry Marshall’s direction.

Music is by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel and book by Larry Gelbart, the creator of M*A*S*H, so you know it’s going to be full of wise-guy banter. There is no witty Hawkeye Pierce here, though, and no theme as serious as war, so the payoff is mostly goofs on the film noir genre. A beautiful woman has “legs that only stopped when they came to the floor,” and a newspaper is “yesterday’s lies with today’s date on ’em.”

The story is set in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s and the action surrounds a detective we know only as Stone (Dan Sterba). We meet him after hearing gunshots and he’s rolled out on a hospital gurney, a voiceover signaling a flashback. But wait — characters soon jerk backward a few steps, spouting rewind gibberish, and correct their dialogue. Upstage is a writer named Stine (Federico Rodriguez) who is typing them into being.

Soon we see that the real story, and conflict, here is between Stine and a garrulous Hollywood director named Buddy Fidler (Aubie Merrylees). The writer is adapting a novel of his into a screenplay, and Buddy is a control-freak nitpicker who keeps insisting on changes that are making a mishmash of the original. But Stine is pulling in $5000 a week rather than the $25 a day and eight cents a mile of his frayed-collar detective, so he’s reluctant to push back too hard.

The appeal of film noir — its existential brooding and moody cinematographic chiaroscuro — isn’t in evidence in this musical. City of Angels is really caricaturing the low-brow pulp fiction gumshoe, the badly written hard-boiled detectives of the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wannabes, where instead of facing a stylized dark life a reader could escape from it.

As well as being amused by the stereotypical dialogue of the genre, occasionally we do get some clever exchanges. Cop: “What case you working on?” Stone: “Who says I am?” Cop: “I see groceries on the table.” And my personal favorite, from Buddy: “Listen to this melody! You’ll think your ears are gettin’ laid.”

On Broadway this was a vehicle for terrific performances, and likewise the Brown production is showcasing some impressive singers. Among the notables are Rodriguez, especially with the poignant “Funny” at the end; Julian Cihi as Sinatra-esque crooner Jimmy Powers; and Leighton Bryan doing character and vocal double duty as Stone’s nasal-voiced secretary, Oolie, and Buddy’s more sultry secretary, Donna.

These songs won’t ever fill the nation’s iPods, but some are cute. A face-off between the writer and his creation, singing “You’re Nothing Without Me,” is inevitable. In “The Tennis Song,” Stone and the alluring femme fatale Alaura (Zoe Chao) get to bounce double entendres back and forth (“It’s not exciting unless the competition is stiff”). The director gets to defend his interfering rewrites with “The Buddy System.”

As Buddy, Merrylees is one of the high points of this romp, succeeding in the tricky task of bringing a loudmouthed stereotype to entertaining life through sheer, brazen chutzpah — much like the character himself. As Stone, the handsome, square-jawed Sterba has less of a chance to shine, since the detective is so tarnished by hackneyed dialogue, but he has his moments. Chao, as his beautiful, rich, scheming counterpart, has fun exercising vampish wiles, so we enjoy her too.

With this colorful period opportunity, the costume design of Phillip Contic is quaintly eye-catching. Michael McGarty designed a simple and efficient set for the Stuart Theatre stage, tucking a couple of desks and beds off to the sides and letting two enormous palm trees dominate at stage left. Even more out of the way — as in invisible — is the orchestra, which music director Colin Fitzpatrick conducts at the side, looking as though he’s waving his arms in a phone booth.

Running 2-1/2 hours, this isn’t a musical for people who aren’t easily won over by musicals, since even the original Broadway offering was as fluffy as a feather boa. Those with a musical dependency, however, will want to check it out.