'City Of Angels' soars at Goodspeed

‘City Of Angels’ is on stage at the Goodspeed Opera House through Nov. 27. Photos by Diane Sobolewski of Goodspeed Musicals.

In the interest of full disclosure, I really loved “City Of Angels,” currently at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam through Nov. 27. My wife and I saw its original production on Broadway in 1990, a monster hit that won six Tonys and a dozen Drama Desk Awards and ran for more than a thousand performances in New York alone. This Goodspeed production is better - for its astounding stagecraft and the intimacy this small theater creates between the performers and the audience. I have enjoyed countless stage shows in my time, many of them at the Goodspeed; but none has entertained me more than this one.

What’s so special here? An uncommonly intelligent and witty plot, to start with. The setting is Hollywood in the late 1940s. Two stories are occurring simultaneously - a screwball comedy and a film noir detective drama. Stine is a bestselling crime novelist adapting one of his hardboiled novels into a screenplay for movie mogul Buddy Fidler. As Stine struggles to maintain his personal and artistic integrity, clashing with Fidler over political correctness and constant demands for rewrites, his screenplay about his private eye noir hero Stone (think Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe) also comes to life, an amusing and engaging mystery. The real-life and “reel-life” plots are interwoven ingeniously, fueled by Larry Gelbart’s (“A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,” TV’s “M*A*S*H”) sophisticated and hilarious dialogue.

Composer Cy Coleman has given us a full-blown jazz score to underscore the action, dialogue and transitions, evoking our treasured film noir memories. While not chart-busting hits, most of his songs, all original to the show, seem like authentic standards of the era that you would swear you’ve heard before. Two standouts are the rollicking Latin rendering of “All You Have To Do Is Wait” by Stone’s nemesis, Detective Munoz, and the first act finale, “You’re Nothing Without Me,” a cynical duet between Stine and Stone so dynamically delivered that it gave me chills.

The cast of two dozen is uniformly superb, not a false note among them. All of the principals, with the exception of D. B. Bonds (Stine) and Burke Moses (Stone) play dual roles in Hollywood and in the evolving screenplay. The dual portrayals are not always obvious at first, and it’s fun when you spot them. Bond’s Stine, driven to the brink by Fidler’s scheming, finds his steel spine in the end with the help of Moses’s hard-as-nails Stone; and their booming voices blow us away with the show’s finale, the triumphant “I’m Nothing Without You.” Liz Pearce as Stone’s temptress is right up there with the best of those ’40s femme fatales. Nancy Anderson as Stone’s girl Friday is the quintessential wisecracking secretary with a yen for the boss. Danny Bolero is hilarious as Stone’s ex-partner with a bitter grudge, the origins of which change with each rewrite. Laurie Wells is Stone’s ex-girlfriend, the perfect embodiment of the era’s sultry torch singers, moaning low with “Every Breath I Take.” Kathleen Rooney takes her sex kitten role close to a sinful level, and Jay Russell’s Buddy Fidler personifies smarmy and obnoxious.

What really makes this production so special, what raises it above previous versions in my opinion is the Goodspeed’s aforementioned and amazing stagecraft. Stagecraft produces the effect, the impression created on the stage by the skillful use of standard theatrical tools such as set design, lighting, costumes and sound, among others. This show has two dozen cast members who populate 40 (count them, 40) separate and distinct scenes. We are whirled about among a hospital, a private eye’s office, a mogul’s office, a writer’s bedroom, a writer’s office, a private eye’s bedroom, a cocktail lounge, a singer’s dressing room, a Hollywood mansion’s terrace and solarium, a county morgue, a recording studio, the county jail, and a movie soundstage, among others, most of them more than once. And we need to distinguish which scenes are in real-life Hollywood and which are in the reel-life screenplay. On the large Broadway stage, the different sets were scattered about the boards and lit when their turns came up. On Goodspeed’s famously tiny stage, all these scenes and action have to happen in the same space and with no annoying delays during scene changes.

Here ingenious stagecraft comes to the rescue. David Gordon’s two-story set has a spiral staircase, a multi-tasking balcony, various pieces of furniture gliding in and out of view and numerous walls of bright Venetian blinds. These blinds, opened and closed, raised and lowered, become perfect screens for John Lasiter’s extraordinary lighting effects, projections and videos, providing opulent Technicolor for the Hollywood scenes and neo-noir gray scale for the black and white movie scenes, resplendent with swaying palms, swirling smoke, lush gardens and dreary interiors, all done so seamlessly that you take them for granted, as you should. Tracy Christensen’s countless costumes are dead-on authentic. Jay Hilton’s sound design and Michael O’Flaherty’s music direction navigate us through the transitions, transporting us magically to that bygone era so fondly remembered.

You can bet that stage producers and directors from around the country are flocking to Goodspeed for this master class in stagecraft, all brilliantly orchestrated by veteran director Darko Tresnjak, who also happens to be the current artistic director of Hartford Stage. Do yourself a big favor and join them.

“City Of Angels” continues at the Goodspeed Opera House through Nov. 27.  Performances are on Wednesdays through Sundays, including both evening performances and many matinees, and with an expanded schedule during Thanksgiving week. For a complete schedule and to order tickets, contact the Goodspeed Box Office at 860-873-8668 or online at goodspeed.org.