City of Angels Review

Evening News Review - Tuesday 21st January 2003

Thom Dibdin
City of Angels Church Hill Theatre

In a bright and breezy production of a tricky, modern musical, local amateur company Tempo is on top form at the Church Hill Theatre.

City of Angels is one of those musicals which sounds and looks great on the professional stage - but is a devil to perform. Fortunately, when it comes to musical ability and inventive staging, Tempo is easily up to the trickiest tunes and the most complex of stories.

The book, by M*A*S*H script-writer Larry Gelbart, tells a complicated pair of tales.

On the one hand there is the story of an author, Stine, who has gone to Hollywood to turn his award-winning novel into a screenplay. But every time he writes a scene, his producer Buddy Fidler wants to make a change.

On the other hand, while Stine works to get his script ready, the Hollywood scenes are intercut with scenes from the movie he is writing. It’s a hardboiled film noir, with a down-at-heel private eye by the name of Stone, a dame whose looks seduce him into a case he cannot afford to take and a secretary with a heart of gold.

What makes this seemingly over-complicated device worth the effort is the way the two stories reflect each other - and the way in which the Hollywood strand is used to tell the story of the movie strand. It even allows scenes in the movie to be reshot, or run backwards, as Stine compromises himself to the studio’s demands.

All the film noir clichés must have been irresistible to Tempo’s artistic director, Colin Peter. But while they make for a potentially great show, his challenge was to ensure the story is easy to understand - as nearly every member of the cast appears in both strands of the musical.

The solution, to have the movie in black and white costumes and set on one side of the stage with the Hollywood scenes in colour on the other side, works neatly.

And there’s nothing wrong with the singing. Cy Coleman’s music is hard to perform, with its seductively sliding semi-tones and scat-vocal ideas applied to barber-shop-quartet harmonies, but there is not one member of the cast who fails in their task.

Equally impressively, they all get their tongues around David Zippel’s twisting lyrics.

Tempo has aimed high and while the musical itself is a complex affair, this is a production which always chooses the simple solution when it comes to telling the story.

But its real success is the simplest of all. Every performer, from the stars to the members of the ensemble, from the singers of Angel City Sextet to the musicians of the LA Blue Notes big band, has earned their place on the stage.

Run ends Saturday 25th January 2003