Spectator - 10/4/93 - Sheridan Morley

At the Prince of Wales, City of Angels is an unusual kind of adult, urban delight: a huge, hit musical put together by what must have seemed in rehearsal an unlikely trio: the writer Larry Gelbart, Broadway's natural successor in caustic wit to the late George S. Kaufman but a man whose last musical triumph had been one of Stephen Sondheim's first, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; the director Michael Blakemore who, despite a hugely distinguished career at the National and elsewhere, had never staged a musical in his life; and the composer Cy Coleman who, alone of the trio, had a long run of Broadway musical hits from Barnum all the way back to Sweet Charity.

Moreover, what they were planning had little to do with the usual expectations of a Broadway musical: no chorus lines, no show-stopping finale, no 'eleven o'clock number' to send them humming out into the night. Instead, a vastly complex double plot centred on Stine (Martin Smith) who writes Chandleresque thrillers in the California of the late 1940s, and Stone (Roger Allam) who is their fictional hero. Stine occupies the left-hand, full-colour side of the stage, either at his typewriter or in constant professional combat with his studio boss about the rewrites. Stone occupies the right-hand, black-and-white side of the stage, acting out the gumshoe thriller that is being written and played before our very eyes.

With me so far? Now, at times the two anti-heroes meet, either for a duet ('You're Nothing Without Me') or to share overlapping characters: Stine's wife (Fiona Hendley) also becomes Stone's sultry nightclub nemesis in Stine's fiction and Stone's bed. And that's even before it gets complicated; where most musicals expect you to check your wits in at the cloakroom with your coat, this one expects you to sharpen them before you sit down.

In that sense, it's the most intelligent and grown-up Broadway show in many a long season, since Kiss of the Spiderwoman is only opening there this month; but it is also a joyous celebration of the old Hollywood, where all the heroes looked like Bogart as Sam Spade, all the women were as sultry as Lauren Bacall teaching him to whistle, and all the villains were as megalomaniac as the movie mogul here who (wonderfully taken over the top by Henry Goodman) announces that 'flashbacks are a thing of the past' and that 'nothing was ever hurt by being improved'.

City of Angels is in every respect a rarity: it stars not a singer, nor a dancer, but a director (Blakemore) and a librettist (Gelbart) who have brought very different talents into the studio setting. Blakemore is a genius of stage-management (witness his Noises Off) and Gelbart a living history of Los Angeles since the war. What they have created is a company show for at least half a dozen principals, all of whom are primarily actors rather than hoofers, which simultaneously parodies and celebrates all the old Hollywood crime-caper movie traditions, reminding us at one and the same time both of how we were suckered by them all, and of much we now miss and need them on the wide screen.

The lyricist, David Zippel is no less adept at the genre: a line like 'what they write for the screen isn't right for the screen' is brave when designed for the ear alone, and a song about the old nepotistic studio system which manages to rhyme 'nephews' with 'refuse' is one that would not have shamed Sondheim. This is also an immensely classy show, courageous enough to risk losing its audience in the labyrinth of the first-act plot, only to retrieve them in the second half in good time for a stunning studio finale. City of Angels is the best box of tricks in town, and it sets up a standard of 1940s Hollywood musicals which Sunset Boulevard will have to match.

The Times - 31/3/93 - Benedict Nightingale

Up goes the curtain on the office of a private eye deep in Bogart territory. The desk, chairs, files, detective, secretary, client: everything is black, white or grey, except the dialogue, which comes in a variety of brash, bright hues. "Three million people in the City of Angels, and half of them up to something they don't want the other half to know," declares a smoky voiceover. "Los Angeles is not so different from a pretty girl with the clap." But hardly has the first glamorous customer gathered her furs and exited than the figures and dialogue start running backwards, and a screen-writer is revealed in full colour, typing out yet another revision to what is, it seems, a black-and-white movie. It is just one of many marvellous coups de theatre in the most brilliantly inventive musical London has seen in years.

Let's not talk (as some do across the pond) as if the War of Independence is being remounted on Broadway, with Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon replacing taxes and tea as insults to local patriotism. Nevertheless, some kind of American fight-back is clearly under way. If Ken Ludwig's Gershwin-feast Crazy for You rediscovers the tunefulness, physical bravura and upbeat energy the New York musical seemed to have mislaid, City of Angels does almost more to reclaim an abrasiveness, a wisecracking humour and other such sophisticated strengths.

All right, there is Sondheim; but his appeal to the mainstream public has seldom if ever matched that of Angels, which ran nearly three years in New York. And can even his ingenuity compare with that of Larry Gelbart's book? Offices, bedrooms tacky and lush, bits of mansion, a morgue, a bar, and the passing street slide on and off the stage as two overlapping, interlocking and comically juxtaposed tales unfold, each with its harsh, funny songs and Chandleresque banter.

The screenwriter is Martin Smith's earnest Stine, tempted away from his wife by a sexy secretary and browbeaten by a producer played with gloating bluster and bully-boy glee by Henry Goodman. His marriage collapses and so does his script, thanks to a creative ideology well summed up by such Hollywoodisms as "I've read a synopsis of every book you've written" and "I could take ten seconds out of the Minute Waltz". Meanwhile his hero, Roger Allam's worldly-wise Stone gets more and more thickly embroiled in one of those Forties thrillers which throw up siren women, killer-heavies and assorted eccentrics, including a Howard Hughes clone trapped in an iron lung that looks like Stephenson's Rocket with a dentist's mirror on top.

Does it sound confusing? Thanks to Michael Blakemore's deft production, the story of Stone is gripping throughout, and that of Stine, uneasy victim of Hollywood cynicism in what he's rudely informed is the McCarthy era, amusing in a rueful, downbeat sort of way. Indeed, we are successfully steered through droll doublings and wry contrasts. Stone resists the same secretary, Haydn Gwynne, whom Stine seduces. It becomes clear that Stone is Stine's fantasy of himself: morally stronger, physically harder, and as adept as Houdini when it comes to making his escapes.

Indeed, one of the best songs has the two men trading sharp-edged insults about their reliance on each other. But then the quality seldom falters, musically or verbally. Cy Coleman comes up with big-band swing, feisty jazz, period pop, even a Latino number. David Zippel provides the nifty rhymes: a tribute to philistinism, an elegy about being the other woman ("I'm one of a long line of girls that chooses the wrong guy to be sweet on, The girl with a face that says welcome that men can wipe their feet on"), and an ode to California's gas chamber, sung with vindictive brio by David Schofield. Altogether, a classy delight.

Independent on Sunday - 4/4/93 - Irving Wardle

As Tom Stoppard once said, the best stroke of luck any writer can have is to find that two plays will go into one. So it was for the authors of City of Angels: a pastiche film noir incorporating the drama of how the film came to be made. On one side, a private eye pursuing his quarry through a jungle of luxuriant Californian corruption; on the other, a screenwriter trapped in the equally labyrinthine coils of studio intrigue. One risking his life for justice; the other for fame and pots of dough.

As soon as you get the idea (which has been drifting over from Broadway for the past three years), you start inventing the show for yourself - which still leaves you unprepared for Michael Blakemore's wonderfully co-ordinated production. Larry Gelbart's book would make an excellent piece in its own right, but music and lyrics emerge as equal partners, with Cy Coleman and David Zippel writing at the height of their powers in a brilliant evocation of 1940s Broadway and Hollywood. The irony, in a piece proclaiming the supremacy of the solitary artist, is its triumphant vindication of the collective method.

Sheer ingenuity - of rhymes, visual cross-reference (in Robin Wagner's designs), and plotting (the main thriller characters all have studio counterparts) - is what makes you sit up: from the opening sight of Stone (the gumshoe) receiving a Chandleresque client in his monochrome office, only to replay the scene in fast reverse as Stine (the writer) arrives in colour, xxxing it out on his typewriter. Come the script conference and Stine changes from omnipotent creator to defenceless hack as the reptilian producer, Buddy, dismembers his brain-child, scattering new-minted Goldwynisms and genial insults ("the characters leap off the page," he says, tearing a page out to prove it). The two sets are then shunted together for a man-eating duet ("What You Don't Know About Women") between Stone's secretary and Stine's wife, mirroring each other's actions down to the tying of scarves and door-slamming false exits.

Even at this early point, the show's governing idea is already implicit. One woman exists only inside Stine's head, the other in his life, but fictional insight is of no help in keeping his marriage intact. Characters, in other words, are cleverer than their authors; an argument that supplies Gelbart with his climax when Stone rebels against the latest of a series of gutless rewrites and takes over the typewriter himself ("I’m your private dick-tator"), routing the vampire producer and awarding his creator a Hollywood happy ending.

By which time life has also been taken over by fairy tale. As Stine puts it: "Time I got back to the reality of fiction." Either way, one heartening thing about the show is that it takes fiction seriously. It is not a camp joke about style. The two plots couple pastiche with straight suspense narrative which becomes electrifying when their threads intertwine. Here is Stine writhing through another script conference while his hero is being tied up for slaughter by a pair of hoodlums; and it is even money whether they will polish him off before the producer gets the knife in. Innumerable small touches work the same trick: accusations by Stone's wife become recycled into his script; a close harmony group are seen recording a sickly ballad, which grinds to its end on the gramophone in Buddy's quilted bedroom.

That number (a hilariously expert showpiece for the resident vocal quartet), together with Coleman's excursions into Latino rhythms, the jazz waltz, torch song, sex-duel duets (with tennis rackets), and knife-chord film atmospherics, accompany the book with equal wit and loving recall for the past. But if one thing defines the sound of this show it is the piling up of wailing brass discords over an ominous percussion figure a la Elmer Bernstein; as a persistent reminder that there is nothing dated about the sweet smell of success. Otherwise, some fine ample voices; a brain-to-brain Stine-Stone partnership between Martin Smith and Roger Allam; and Henry Goodman's transformation of the oily Buddy into an monster on the Jonsonian scale.

Independent - 1/4/93 - Rhoda Koenig

There's nothing wrong with musicals being mindless, so long as they're not heartless as well. Those who are bothered by the low intellectual level of most musical shows can certainly find solace in City of Angels, which takes us to Hollywood in the late Forties, a world of schemers, sycophants, sluts, and schmucks (the last, of course, a synonym for "writers"). Not only is Larry Gelbart's brainy book funnier than most straight comedies: David Zippel's lyrics sparkle, Robin Wagner's scenery is stylish, even Paul Gallo's lighting is notable for its wit. Michael Blakemore's production also has plenty to appeal to the senses: the Chandler-esque story we watch being filmed has lavish sets, clever musical staging (by Walter Painter), and the kind of blonde for whom a bishop would kick a hole in a plate-glass window.

The private-eye movie is being written by Stine, whose biggest problem in adapting his novel is getting his page past producer-director Buddy Fidler, the tyrant of the lot, who owns every starlet's mouth and every writer's conscience. Stine's wife, Gabby, hates Hollywood, not just for corrupting her husband's work, but for tempting him with the proximity of such long-legged beauties as Donna, Buddy's lovelorn secretary. As Stine battles with Buddy and Gabby, and his own despair and lust, his struggles are reflected in the script of his movie, whose characters have real-life counterparts. But the influence doesn't go in only one direction: the real characters start speaking the movie characters' lines (both parallel parts are played by the same actors); Stone, rebelling against Buddy's corny revisions, urges Stine to be a tough guy like him.

In an excellent cast, Roger Allam stands out as the intense, unflappable Stone, remarking matter-of-factly of his client that "only the floor kept her legs from going on forever", and singing without removing his cigarette. Haydn Gwynne is hilariously plaintive, bemoaning her status as the perpetual other woman, whose beau "can't introduce the girl he's with / There's lots of smirking motel clerks who call me 'Mrs Smith'". Like the studio, however, the evening is dominated by Henry Goodman's Buddy, for whom the phrase "bumptious megalomaniac" is not a tautology.

Cy Coleman's music is certainly atmospheric - when did you last hear a musical begin with a minor chord? But its pastiche of contemporary jazz, swing, and Latin rhythms is atmospheric in another sense - so insubstantial it dissipates as you're hearing it. Nor is dance a feature of a show whose wisecracking characters stretch credibility by singing. And, though Gelbart's book is unremittingly clever, the moral problem it poses is a phoney one (hey, it's a detective story, not Faust), and its ending uses irony to camouflage faulty construction. It may seem ungrateful, in this dismal period for musicals, to point it out, but for all its virtues, City of Angels lacks the sentiment and exultation that, ideally, is produced in the theatre when words meet music. As another show's lyricist said: "Oh, it's fine to be a genius, of course / But keep that old horse before the cart / First, you gotta have heart."

Sunday Times - 4/4/93 - John Peter

So: there's life in the old thing yet. Just as I was about to decide that the only good American musical was an old American musical, the new Cy Coleman number comes romping in, bursting at the seams with energy, ideas and a sense of sophisticated enjoyment, and proving that it's no good critics developing prejudices. Coleman's music is muscular, ironic, theatrical: if Sondheim's scores paint character, Coleman's drive the story forward. David Zippel's lyrics are elegant, impudent, witty: his rhymes and rhythms have both cheek and charm, and remind you of the old days when men were men, jokes were funny, and lyrics had something better to do than slow down the action. Larry Gelbart's venomously funny book requires you to lean forward a little and, rather than think about your interval drink, actually follow what is going on.

It is worth it. The story is about Stine, a Hollywood scriptwriter (Martin Smith) working for a monstrous egomaniac producer, Buddy Fidler (Henry Goodman), on a Raymond Chandler-ish film about a private eye called Stone (Roger Allam). Two tales are told. One, the making and unmaking of Fidler's movie; the other, the movie itself. Susannah Fellows plays the sinister vamp who employs Stone in the movie; in "real life" she is Fidler's man-eating wife. In the movie, Haydn Gwynne is Stone's lonely, wise-cracking secretary, who secretly loves him; in "real life" she Stine's lonely, wise-cracking secretary, who secretly loves him. David Schofield is both a policeman in the movie and the actor who plays him. The two plots overlap again and again, but without a moment's confusion. The story glitters with ingenuity.

I don't know whether Fidler would be likely to know what a film noir is: he probably imagines that it is a type of silk stocking. But a 1940s film noir is what he is producing, and Gelbart's book turns in a dazzling spoof of the genre. The joke is underlined by a brilliantly witty visual coup de théatre: Robin Wagner's sets and Florence Kotz's costume's are all black, grey and white for the Stone-movie scenes, and garishly polychrome for the Fidler-Stine scenes. That is, until Stone and Stine meet, and the gritty, romantic dream world of the wise-cracking movie and the treacherous reality of the mendacious movie-makers come face to face. The story rebels against its creator. So who is writing whom? .Who is betraying whom? Even serious modernists might enjoy this show without a sense of slumming.

Michael Blakemore's direction is elegant, athletic and deftly economical - vital in a story where almost  everyone plays two neatly complementary roles. The acting is spic-and-span, stylish and funny. In what other country could you see serious classical actors as Roger Allam, Henry Goodman and Haydn Gwynne despatching these hilarious, bittersweet, make-believe parts with such nimble virtuoso precision? This is a glittering evening, swaggering and confident, with a golden smell of success.