book by Larry Gelbart, music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel
seen 18 December 2014
A new production at the Donmar Warehouse of a musical first produced in 1989.
This piece cleverly blends the classic Hollywood story of an artist trying to make good in the movies while preserving some sort of artistic and personal integrity, with another classic Hollywood form, namely film noir. It does this by showing us the writer Stine (Hadley Fraser) creating and revising his screenplay, and battling to preserve it against the overbearing whims of the director Buddy Fidler (Peter Polycarpou), while at the same time showing us the resulting film featuring the gumshoe Stone (Tam Mutu) with the 'usual suspects' of femmes fatales, gangsters, cops of dubious morality, and other noirish vested interests.
The set design (Robert Jones) ingeniously makes the upper back wall an overwhelming pile of manuscripts, while the lower half is a series of sliding doors covered in the names of jazz classics (stacked boxes of sheet music or records). The whole is informed by brilliant lighting effects (Howard Harrison) whereby everything is coloured if it is the backdrop to characters in the real world, or else bathed in silvery light if it belongs in the film. As the audience enters, subdued colour prevails as a high fan in front of a spot casts shadows through the smoke onto a writer's desk in the centre of an otherwise empty stage. However once Stine's importance as The Writer is established, he spends a great deal of his writing time at a desk on the upper level. leaving the main acting area free for the development of the film and of his troubles in fighting for his version of the screenplay.
The cast is dressed in bold colours when in the 'real life' scenes, and in silvers, whites and greys when in the film - it eventually becomes clear that many of the 'real' characters are actually the actors hired to star in the film. There is often an echoing of lines between film and reality - perhaps because someone is deliberately quoting the screenplay they have seen, or else because a telling phrase has worked its way from Stine's life into the film he is writing. It is all very clever, and allows the conventionally steely wisecracks and glamorous posturings of the film genre to resonate with a more personal force when they are deployed in the far messier situations of real life.
There are wonderfully atmospheric jazz songs supported by an off-stage orchestra and an on-stage quartet of 'City Angels' who manage to set the scene both aurally and visually with enormous aplomb, and in one delicious sequence show the utter boredom of recording backing music for an utterly self-centred crooner. There's a great climax to the first act when Stine and Stone argue with each other in song, the sharp division of coloured and B&W lighting fractured by the attempt of each to reach a dominant position. In the second act, Donna, the director's long-suffering assistant (Rebecca Trehearn) gives voice to the eternal complaint of the taken-for-granted woman in 'You Can Count on Me', while the film and the writing of it manage to have at least two denouements each due to the cunning ways in which rewritings have become part of the fabric of the piece.
There are inventive lighting gags throughout, not least the inspired projection of reverse writing on a glass door, which materialises as Stine types the scene setting instructions. These are matched by dazzling reverse action sequences when Stine erases and re-writes scenes. The actors judder their most recent actions backwards and apparently speak their lines backwards as well (they must be miming to a reversed tape .... surely?), a device that never outstays its welcome.
Josie Rourke (director) and Stephen Mear (choreographer) have created a hugely enjoyable production, in which a very self-referential piece (musical looking at playwright writing film script which is concurrently presented to us) comes across with delightful verve and conviction. The cast don't put a foot wrong amidst the highly mobile props and the crossovers between the world of the film and the world of in which the film is made.
But why are the cast miked in such a small space?
There are wonderfully atmospheric jazz songs supported by an off-stage orchestra and an on-stage quartet of 'City Angels' who manage to set the scene both aurally and visually with enormous aplomb, and in one delicious sequence show the utter boredom of recording backing music for an utterly self-centred crooner. There's a great climax to the first act when Stine and Stone argue with each other in song, the sharp division of coloured and B&W lighting fractured by the attempt of each to reach a dominant position. In the second act, Donna, the director's long-suffering assistant (Rebecca Trehearn) gives voice to the eternal complaint of the taken-for-granted woman in 'You Can Count on Me', while the film and the writing of it manage to have at least two denouements each due to the cunning ways in which rewritings have become part of the fabric of the piece.
There are inventive lighting gags throughout, not least the inspired projection of reverse writing on a glass door, which materialises as Stine types the scene setting instructions. These are matched by dazzling reverse action sequences when Stine erases and re-writes scenes. The actors judder their most recent actions backwards and apparently speak their lines backwards as well (they must be miming to a reversed tape .... surely?), a device that never outstays its welcome.
Josie Rourke (director) and Stephen Mear (choreographer) have created a hugely enjoyable production, in which a very self-referential piece (musical looking at playwright writing film script which is concurrently presented to us) comes across with delightful verve and conviction. The cast don't put a foot wrong amidst the highly mobile props and the crossovers between the world of the film and the world of in which the film is made.
But why are the cast miked in such a small space?
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