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 |  | Review by site-user, Charles Lloyd
With a visual style borrowed from film noir iconography and a plot combining detective thriller and Hollywood satire in a musical comedy, Music Theatre Warwick's production of the Gelbart/Coleman/Zippel show has all the ingredients that lovers of classic Hollywood adore.
There is a private eye searching for a missing girl, gold-digging femme fatales, reclusive tycoons with private spiritual gurus, bent cops, and secrets returning from the past.
 [it is]...- all delivered in dynamic hardboiled dialogue and narration to rival any pulp paperback.
 | Μύ | Charles Lloyd
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Grafting this onto the musical comedy format allows these generic elements some emotional depth, with the stock characters allowed to round out their personalities by expressing themselves in song - all delivered in dynamic hardboiled dialogue and narration to rival any pulp paperback.
Flashing back from the character's death, City of Angels follows the fairly well-trodden path to the dark side of Tinseltown, with twist that the detective's travails (beatings, seductions etc) are revealed as a fiction.
The characters, we soon discover, have their dialogue and actions rewound and rewritten, and the production makes good use of cinematic techniques such as freeze-frame and rewind.
| Μύ |  | Stine, a young novelist
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The noir plot is in fact a script being played out in the mind of Stine, the 'real' writer, whose struggle with a Thalberg-style studio system-era producer form the real thrust of the show.
They argue over words versus pictures, storytelling, reality versus representation, and censorship, and there is plenty in David Zippel's excellent lyrics to keep film-loving audiences amused.
As the 'scripted' detective reveals a nasty web of careerist and romantic conspiracies in Hollywood itself, the characters start talking back to their author.
Romantic entanglements on both sides complicate things, of course, but author teams up with fictional alter-ego to resolve these conflicts with a Hollywood ending to what is, essentially, the all-American story of an individual's struggle for success.
| Μύ |  | Femme fatale Mallory
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City of Angels is undoubtedly an entertaining show, especially for anyone who loves musicals or old movies.
There are innumerable quotable lines and the American movie accents are reassuringly accurate.
The music is excellent throughout, and this production benefits immensely from the excellent 28-piece orchestra led by Owen Lloyd.
In a large and impressive cast, Daniel Byrne shows great promise in the lead role. As the writer, he brings an oddly earnest and Ben Stiller-ish quality to the role. Rachel Ellis, Claire Wrench and Daniel Akers also deserve praise.
If any fault can be found, it would be with the sometimes stilted choreography, especially in the large ensemble scenes, where the pace and dynamism required by the music isn't quite achieved.
Show details
City of Angels is on at Warwick Arts Centre until 25 January.
For more information about the production, please follow the City of Angels link on the left.
Tickets can be booked on the Warwick Arts Centre website, also linked on the left.
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