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.
