Review: City of Angels by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
You have to be alert in this town to catch St. Edward's stagings at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, off South Congress. They're of professional quality, well directed, well designed and well received. They even feature two or three Equity guest artists per production, whose participation spurs the already gifted St. Ed's students to even higher levels of accomplishment.
Their productions flash across the horizon like meteors, though. Two weekends and that's it.
City of Angels director Michael McKelvey in his white jacket and carnival barker style promised us before this show that next year the University will add another production, to make a season of five. He was hawking season tickets, available at impressively modest prices ($60 for general admission level). He forgot to mention one of the most agreeable aspects: the fact that the box office will call you well in advance to ask for your preferences for date and for location in the stadium seating of the MMNT theatre-in-a-square.
I asked for my usual obsessive preference, first row, as close to the action as I could get. Not the best choice, I discovered, for this show, in this theatre. Yes, the action opens right in front of you on the wide floor of the stage, and I jumped with anticipation when a striking quartet strode on with an up-tempo late 1940s stalking scat number. Michelle Brandt, Nathan Brockett, Andrew Butler and Elizabeth Newchurch glowered, postured, whirled and flirted across the floor with glinting, cynical sophistication. Then David Long as the private detective, Stone, arrived before me in his bare office. His gal Friday, Oolie, reluctantly let in a strange woman with brass blonde hair and black lipstick. The wise cracking began, a standoff of suspicion, while we got to hear Stone's thoughts, phrased in gaudy similes. Blonde Alaura Kingsley wanted Stone to locate her missing stepdaughter.
But wait. . . the action is interrupted, revised, reversed, and edited. Things change. There's another reality, operating literally at a second level -- on the platforms high in the corners of the theatre square. Suddenly I'm twisting around, leaning back, getting a desperately tilted and truncated view of a Hollywood producer getting a haircut in his office and gabbing on the telephone. In the northeast corner we will see the study where Stine the writer slams away on his manual typewriter, revising a movie script. In the other corner is the bare bedroom that'll be the location for his quarrel with his departing wife and for his tryst with a sad secretary.
The shamus opening of City of Angels is straight from the tradition of detective novel genius Raymond Chandler, whose deliberately over-gaudy deadpan style laid the basis for the tough guy tale both in the pulps and in the movies. If they recognized references, most in the audience probably thought this was a parody of the Warner Brothers' tough guy movies with the likes of Humphrey Bogart. In fact, Bogart did star with Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, drawn from Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel in a screenplay crafted, among others, by William Faulkner in a brief Hollywood stay.
Smartass writer Larry Gelbart piles it high here. This is a musical comedy satire of Hollywood, especially of philistine, self-important producers. Gelbart uses the figure of a successful novelist (read: Faulkner, Dos Passos, Gelbart himself) obliged to screenwrite and then rewrite and then rewrite and then swallow a travesty of his story. Many of the MMNT cast double or triple as Hollywood types, as figures in the much adulterated movie action, and as characters in the writer's "real" life. Some rewrites jolt the shamus action into reverse for a variant of a scene. Ultimately, and inevitably, writer Stine and his alter ego Stone the fictional shamus contest with one another and then team up to resist the wicked of Hollywood.
So don't go expecting a straight story line. Chandler's whodunnits, unlike those of the tidy Agatha Christie, are mazes of deception anyway, and once the omniscient writer and the egotistical producer start making competing edits, you'll just lose the intrigue. For example, I am still not clear how Jacob Trussel as the appalling producer Buddy Fidler wound up dead on a slab at the morgue as Irving S. Irving in the shamus tale, and whether he stayed dead or not.
It hardly matters, though. Just go with it. The satisfactions of this house of mirrors are the music, the deadpan clowning, the vivid secondary characters and the relevation that both David Long and Jamie Goodwin, familiar faces from Austin Actors' Equity, can not only act these hectic, confused characters, but they also sing strongly and convincingly. Sarah Gay, also from Equity and a highly accomplished vocal artist, does a couple of numbers but spends most of her time as the mannered vamp under that thatch of blonde. The odd choice of black lipstick might have misled some to think she was a literal vampire, as well -- a trendy transformation, these days.
Christopher Smith does an easy walkthrough as the handsome crooner who can't act, and Kimberley Gates carries her lonely torch for Stine and for Stone, in classic valiant heartbroken style. Sarah Burkhalter plays Stine's indignantly departing wife and the shamus's vanished love interest, Bobbi, roles that offer a bit of flash but principally function as plot devices.
A highlight of the show was the obligatory Latino-flavored number -- here, done by Jon Wayne Martin as the tough police lieutenant who with his officers taunts the arrested detective and shows how they expect literally to dance a tarantella and paso de flamenco on his grave.
Michael McKelvey conducts a crackerjack show band of ten.
Oh, and give a thought to the four follow-spot operators -- suspended all evening in black cradles at the cardinal points of the compass high above our heads, they made sure that however confusing the action, we could be sure that we could see it!
Review by Robert Faires, having fun channeling Raymond Chandler in the Austin Chronicle, April 15
Reviews by Rhonda and Preston Kirk for the A-Team of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance, April 13
Review by Clare Croft for Statesman's A360 "Seeing Things" blog, April 12
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, April 23
EXTRA
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City of Angels
by Cy Coleman, Larry Gelbart, David Zippel
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
