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City of Angels

Book by Larry Gelbart
Music by Cy Coleman
Lyrics by David Zippel

Directed by Lowry Marshall
October 18-21 & 25-28, 2007

OCTOBER 27th is SOLD OUT!

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 2 PM
Stuart Theatre

Racy, romantic and riotously funny, City of Angels took Broadway by storm, winning three Tony awards for book, music and lyrics. The award for Best Actor in a Musical went to James Naughton, who started his acting career right here at Brown!

Legendary stage and screen writer Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; Tootsie; M*A*S*H) leads us on a mind-boggling film noir adventure through the mean streets of LA and the mansions of Bel-Air. This is Hollywood the way it used to be, when any time was bedtime and everyone was JAZZED!

CITY OF ANGELS is two shows in one. It is the interweaving of two plots, one dealing with the writing of a screenplay in the legendary Hollywood of the '40's; the other, the enactment of that screenplay. This double feature quality leads to many other unique production values, the most notable being the fact that CITY OF ANGELS is perhaps the only "color coded" show any theatre audience is likely to see. The movie scenes appear in shades of black and white, and the real life scenes are in technicolor. The show boasts two musical scores. One provides the cast with numbers to help reveal certain emotions or to celebrate particular moments in the way that only music can. The "other" score was written to emulate pure movie soundtrack music, 1940's vintage. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the final curtain comes down on two happy endings.

CITY OF ANGELS is the rarest of musical comedies; one that is not only loaded with music and written in the contemporary jazz idiom, but also filled with sidesplitting comedy. Set in the glamorous, seductive Hollywood of the 40's, the world of film studios and flimsy negliges, the show chronicles the misadventures of Stine, a young novelist, attempting a screenplay for movie producer/director, Buddy Fidler. While Fidler professes to be a fan of Stine's work: "I've read a synopsis of every book you've ever written," he assures the author, his gargantuan ego forces Stine to make endless compromises in the script he's writing. The script is an adaptation of one of Stine's novels which features his Raymond Chandleresque hero, a private investigator named Stone. Every movie scene that Stine writes is acted out onstage by a group of characters whose costumes are limited to various shades of black and white. The same is true of the sets in which they appear and the props that they use. With music scored in the genre, we are, in fact, treated to a live version of a 1940's private eye film. It is a tale of decadence and homicide with a liberal sprinkling of femmes fatale.

Frank Rich of the New York Times:

"How long has it been since a musical was brought to a halt by riotous
jokes? One would have to travel back to the 1960's to find a musical as
flat out funny as City of Angels."

Liz Smith of the New York Daily News:

"One of the most innovative, brilliant, perfect, breathtaking, entertaining
pieces of theatre I have ever seen."

Edwin Wilson of the Wall Street Journal:

"Mr. Gelbart, one of the cleverest wordsmiths working today, not only
captures the spirit of the film-noir, he delivers one knockout punch after
another."