CITY OF ANGELS: A Valentine to Classic Movies

This Tony Award-winning show (Best Musical, Score, Book, Actor and Scenic Design) presents music by Broadway veteran and jazz composer Cy Coleman, with song lyrics by David Zippel. But the show is most noted for being funny, with a script by Larry Gelbart, head writer for TV’s M*A*S*H and author of Broadway’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

“There's nothing novel about show-stopping songs and performances in Broadway musicals, but how long has it been since a musical was brought to a halt by riotous jokes?” So begins the Broadway opening night review by New York Times drama critic Frank Rich. “... Only the fear of missing the next gag quiets the audience down.”

“It’s an incredibly funny ride from the beginning to end,” said HSU director Rae Robison, “and a Valentine to film noir. If you love old movies, you’ll love this show—and if you don’t love these movies already, you might start watching them after you’ve seen this musical.”

CITY OF ANGELS: Double Trouble

CITY OF ANGELS: The Original Production

The Broadway opening night of City of Angels in December 1989 looked like a certain disaster. The word on the street was that it would fail, and in the theatre itself, things were even worse. The heating system shut down, and the Virginia Theatre was freezing cold.

But certain comedians will tell you that people will laugh when they’re cold because they're alert, but when they’re hot they’ll just fall asleep. And that night, they laughed. New York Times critic Frank Rich described it as “an evening in which even a throwaway wisecrack spreads laughter like wildfire through the house, until finally the roars from the balcony merge with those from the orchestra and the pandemonium takes on a life of it’s own.”

Instead of failing, City of Angels played for more than two years and nearly 900 performances, and pretty much swept the Tony Awards before moving on to Los Angeles and London, and a national tour.

A year later, Rich would lament that newer musicals were overpriced and “aimed at wealthy tourists of limited attention span and advancing age,” and longed for City of Angels, “a satire that gave the audience credit for verbal and visual imagination.” At the end of his 12 year career as chief critic, Rich named only four new musicals as his favorites. City of Angels was one of them.

CITY OF ANGELS: The Creators

CITY OF ANGELS won Tony Awards for Best Musical, best musical score and best “book” (or script), and the Drama Desk Award for best lyrics.

Its creative team was unique. Composer Cy Coleman was a Broadway veteran, steeped in jazz and classical music. Larry Gelbart had co-written a hit stage show and movies but basically he was from TV (a comedy writer for the Sid Caesar Show, writer and producer and the creative mind behind the TV version of M*A*S*H.) David Zipple, the young lyricist, worked in the theatre but had no credits to speak of. They all had one of the major successes of their individual careers in City of Angels.

After writing popular standards such as “Witchcraft” and “The Best is Yet to Come,” Cy Coleman wrote the music for the show Wildcat (which brought “I Love Lucy”’s Lucille Ball to Broadway) and yielded the classic, “Hey, Look Me Over.” He had a Broadway hit with Little Me, the musical version of Auntie Mame, with book by Neil Simon.

Then Coleman teamed up with a legendary lyricist of the classic stage and movie musical 30s and 40s, Dorothy Fields, for a 1960s classic: Sweet Charity. But it was more than 20 years later that Coleman had another hit with City of Angels. For this play he wrote what’s reputed to be the first jazz score for a Broadway musical, a combination of 1940s-inflected swing and torch songs, Broadway ballads and Hollywood film themes.


Larry Gelbart’s previous hit show was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, produced locally a few years ago at Ferndale Rep. His story about a screenwriter came from experience: he wrote several movies, including Tootsie, which won Best Picture and several other Academy Awards. His earlier script, called Movie Movie, experimented with double storylines involving old Hollywood movies—themes that recur in City of Angels. He also turned his satirical eye to political subjects, for TV movies like Mastergate and Weapons of Mass Distraction.

Lyricist David Zipple went on to write lyrics for several Disney movies, and collaborated with Cy Coleman again on a children’s musical written by Wendy Wasserstein. He had several unproduced projects with Gelbart and one that reunited him with both Coleman and Gelbart. Cy Coleman died in 2004, and Larry Gelbart passed away recently, in September.

Ironically, for a musical about the movies, City of Angels has nothing to do with the 1998 movie of that title, starring Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. That City of Angels was an Americanized version of the German film by Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire.

To further complicate matters in the best Hollywood tradition, a movie version of the musical City of Angels is “in development.”