Also this issue:

Music Man
James Sugg finds songwriting method amid madness.
-Juliet Fletcher

Coming Out of the Dark
A move into white for Thomas Chimes and vibrant work from Stuart Netsky light up Locks Gallery.
-Robin Rice

Preston Foerder
-Debra Auspitz

Curtis Opera Theatre's French Comic One Acts
-David Shengold

River North Chicago Dance Company
-Janet Anderson

Funky Junk Auction/Bike Parts Art Raid
-Debra Auspitz

Fiction
-Toby Zinman

The Tempest
-Toby Zinman

April 10-16, 2003

theater

City of Angels

by David Anthony Fox

Hit shows, they say, are pitched in a single phrase: a "why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-before?" idea worth millions. Imagine the great pitch for City of Angels, a 1989 Broadway hit: "film noir meets the musical." And if the concept alone isn’t enough, consider the 24-carat creative team: Cy Coleman (music), who blends fire-and-ice jazz with tuneful ’40s nostalgia; Larry Gelbart (book), grandfather of the one-liner ("She had a body that made the Venus di Milo look all thumbs"); and David Zippel (lyrics), whose sung words are almost as clever as Gelbart’s spoken ones: "I’ve been "the other woman’ since my puberty began/ I crashed the junior prom/ And met the only married man."

True to its promise, the first 15 minutes of City give the exhilarating rush of greatness. The film noir story is a crafty amalgam of The Maltese Falcon and Big Sleep: rich wife, missing stepdaughter, useless husband (he's permanently residing in an iron lung) and, of course, the requisite sardonic detective, Stone, who falls hard for the ladies.

Suddenly, City makes a U-turn. We realize that Stone is the literary doppelganger of Stine, a novelist who has made a devil's bargain with a Hollywood movie studio. From there, we're in a madcap, double-plotted maze: Stine's world and Stone's. Several cast members play multiple characters.

But the good news ends. By Act II of this murder mystery, it's the audience that's been "clever-ed" to death. There's too much plot and not enough. We're trying to follow a hundred details, but haven't one character or human issue to care about.

At Villanova, director Peter Donohue lets the show get bogged down in elaborate stage business, and fails to distinguish sufficiently between the film noir scenes (which also lack the necessary sense of menace) and the more comedic Hollywood ones. Consequently, the coup de theatre that brings the two plots together scarcely registers.

As for the likable cast, both film noir and musical theater are virtuoso genres that demand complete mastery. Two supporting performers, Nina Donze (Gabby/Bobbi) and Jason J. Michael (Buddy), come closest. Among the rest, few are equally adroit at the singing and acting challenges, and (perhaps inevitably) their freshness is at odds with the hard-bitten style.

Still, the evening is brimming with energy and good will, and if you've never seen City of Angels -- and its large production requirements mean it's a relative rarity -- you'll probably enjoy yourself.

City of Angels

Through April 13, Villanova Theatre, Vasey Hall, 800 Lancaster Ave., Villanova, 610-519-7474.