DOUG MILLER At Stone |
Stone, LA private eye (Doug Miller), has problems: a bunch of mean stooges trying to blow him up, a possibly treacherous lady client, and a former cop partner who wants to pin a murder on him. Stine, New York novelist-turned-LA-screenwriter (Mark Dils), has authored all those problems, and has some of his own: a screenplay-in-progress that doesn't do justice to his original novel, a producer who is ravaging his creation, and a predilection for adultery that has not escaped his wife, a writer who has wisely remained in New York. It's 1940s Hollywood, and we swerve between Stine's reality and Stone's parallel one, in City of Angels, a musical comedy-cum-musical noir, directed by Mary Meserve for South Portland's Lyric Music Theater.Each of the principals in Stine's screenplay, of course, has a counterpart in his real life, so many City cast members have the treat of doing double duty. In keeping with the genres at hand, these are stock noir characters and stock movie-industry characters, and Lyric's cast draws some of them with particular skill and gusto. As Stine's nemesis Buddy Fidler (John Blanchette), the archetypal movie-mogul jerk-off (who says things like "It's perfect — we're fix everything" about Stine's screenplay) is absolutely pitch-perfect — nasal, abrasive, and utterly offensive to everyone.
But the women are the real powerhouses of this show. As Stone's old flame Bobbi and Stine's writer wife Gabby, blonde Ellen Emerson is arch, sharp, and buxom, with a strong whiff of Mae West. Especially good is her number "It Needs Work," in which Bobbi, having received a letter from Stine denying his philandering, subjects Stine's text to a bit of heated literary critique. As Alaura Kingsley, the seductive society dame who hires Stone, and as the actress cast to play her in Fidler's movie, Teri Gauthier drips with coy insinuation. Young Genevieve Myers has a great seduction scene as Alaura's disappeared step-daughter Mallory, who suddenly reappears in Stone's cot, becomingly wrapped in a sheet. Suppleness of limb and voice mark her subsequent number "Lost and Found." And it's worth the price of admission to eat up Melissa Morad's ravishing candor and sensuality as Oolie, Stine's Girl Friday, and Fidler's secretary Donna, with whom Stine is circumnavigating his marital vows. She has an expressive face, alluringly natural movements, and a big, true voice, which make her self-deprecating vamp number "You Can Count on Me" one of the highlights of all these characters' shenanigans.
Everyone's songs and scenes are accompanied (and, sometimes, rewound and re-accompanied, as Stine backspaces on his typewriter and rewrites them) by a super four-man band in the balcony, led by Hans Indigo Spencer. Its noir numbers are all slink and languishing, with the sensuous slouch of sax and muted trumpet; the show tunes are charged with spunk and a healthy edge of irony. Nesting the band up in the balcony has an interesting effect acoustically; the music seems to immerse us more dreamily than usual in these worlds. That works nicely with the play's themes, but creates problems when music occasionally overpowers stage sound; it's particularly noticeable during Stone's recorded voice-over narration, which is often lost.
