Who Sang Funny in City of Angels 1990
'City of Angels' Songs Echo the Jazzy Youth Of Their Composer
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January 23, 1990
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When Cy Coleman sat down to the write the score for the hit musical ''City of Angels,'' the composer, whose theater music has ranged in style from circus tunes (''Barnum'') to comic opera (''On the 20th Century,'') reached back for inspiration to his youthful career as a jazz pianist.
A deliciously funny celebration and spoof of 1940's film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, ''City of Angels'' takes place in two parallel worlds that share the stage. One, lighted in simulated Technicolor, portrays the battle of Stine (Gregg Edelman), a mild-mannered writer struggling to prevent his screenplay-in-progress from being mutilated by a tyrannical producer. The other, in shadowy black and white, depicts the unfolding of the screenplay itself, in which Stine's alter ego, the detective Stone (James Naughton), sidles through a Hollywood netherworld of vicious thugs and femmes fatales.
While Larry Gelbart's parodies of hard-boiled dialogue send up the argot of Raymond Chandler, Mr. Coleman's big-band jazz score oozes with glamour and menace. The songs present a wonderfully atmospheric blend of jazzy torch numbers, swaggering action music and period pop pastiche. Periodically, the Angel City 4, a vocal quartet, materializes to sing in a style that recalls the slinky close harmonies of legendary jazz ensembles like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and the Hi-Lo's.
A Score to Match the Period
''City of Angels,'' the first hit Broadway musical to have a full-blown jazz score, happens to be set in the same period, the late 1940's, in which Mr. Coleman, who had been a child concert pianist, rebelled against his years of formal musical training and drifted into jazz.
It is, he said, his most personal score in a theatrical songwriting career that spans three decades, beginning with ''Wildcat'' (1960) and including ''Little Me'' (1962), ''Sweet Charity'' (1966), ''Seesaw'' (1973), ''I Love My Wife'' (1977), ''On the 20th Century'' (1978) and ''Barnum'' (1980).
''I had just left the High School of Music and Art and had to decide whether to continue doing the same things I had already done,'' Mr. Coleman said, recalling his embrace of jazz in an interview in his midtown office. ''To support myself, I got jobs playing popular music in little bistros and became a sort of society favorite. MCA wanted me to be the new Eddy Duchin, but that didn't interest me, so I gravitated toward jazz. I played at Bop City with Ella Fitzgerald and Illinois Jacquet and worked with various trios and found myself on television. Out of all that emerged a solo career. Though my approach at the piano was kind of be-boppy, my sound was fuller.''
Some of the same 1940's urban atmosphere that permeates ''City of Angels'' can be felt in Mr. Coleman's memento-filled office. Situated in a dingy brick building in the northern reaches of the Manhattan theater district, it has an ambiance that is more Tin Pan Alley than modern corporate pop. Shelves are piled with stacks of timeworn scores, sheet music and old records, some of them 78's. At the center of the office is an upright piano, where the 60-year-old composer went to illustrate musical points.
Making It Swing
The flavor of the songs in ''City of Angels'' echoes Mr. Coleman's piano style in the way it spices up a traditional pop-jazz vocabulary with be-bop accents and enough modern touches to make the score much more than just a clever 40's pastiche. With its generous orchestral underscoring of dialogue to enhance the show's film-noir ambiance, the score is also an ingenious mating of Broadway and Hollywood.
''To put it brazenly, I wanted to do something that I think I'm uniquely qualified to do in the theater, which is present real jazz as opposed to pastiche or the kind of choreographed jazz I've written for other shows,'' Mr. Coleman said. ''By real jazz I mean music whose rhythmic phrases you can't describe but that when you're snapping fingers to it, you say, 'This swings.' ''
If the score for ''City of Angels'' is Mr. Coleman's most personal, it was also one of the most difficult to write. A private-eye yarn does not lend itself naturally to musical form, and Mr. Coleman admitted that it was a challenge to find places in the story where songs would fit.
In putting all the pieces together, ''City of Angels'' was painstakingly constructed out of extended rap sessions that were taped in the Los Angeles home of Mr. Gelbart, the book writer. The project was so carefully planned that, in contrast with most Broadway shows, there were no songs left over when ''City of Angels'' was finished.
Mr. Coleman's lyricist, David Zippel, was previously best known for his work with Wally Harper on songs for Barbara Cook. Mr. Zippel had been under contract as a songwriter for Mr. Coleman's publishing company when he first read an announcement of the show eight years ago and applied for the unfilled slot of lyricist. He even agreed to work for two or three songs on a trial basis.
A Double Assignment
Mr. Zippel, who is now 35, had an unusually tough assignment. Because ''City of Angels'' tells two stories at once, some of the trickier lyrics involved contrasting Mr. Gelbart's characters with their detective-story counterparts. The jazz emphasis of the music also demanded lyrics that would not strain the melodies' twisting jazz phrases.
''When I first got involved in the project, Larry gave me a book of letters that Raymond Chandler wrote while he was in Los Angeles, and that was particularly helpful in capturing the feeling of being a writer in Hollywood in the 40's,'' Mr. Zippel said. ''The first number Cy and I worked on was the torch song, 'With Every Breath I Take.' Since we wanted something that sounded like an old jazz standard filtered through a contemporary sound, I tried to write what I thought would be a Johnny Mercer-like lyric.''
For Mr. Coleman, the collaboration brought back memories of working with the late Dorothy Fields on ''Sweet Charity,'' his first major hit. This time he was the experienced senior member of the partnership.
''I had done two shows with Carolyn Leigh, whom I liked a lot, but like Gilbert and Sullivan we had legendary fights,'' he said. ''I was looking around for a new collaborator, and at a songwriters' party at Sheldon Harnick's I met Dorothy Fields. I told her, 'I'd like to write a song or two with you,' and she said, 'Thank God somebody asked.' I was surprised. Here was this legendary figure waiting around to be asked. She was quite generous and actually hungry for what I could bring to the collaboration. I suppose it gave her a feeling of youth. It's not quite the same as me and David because, though there are years between us, I still feel very vital.''
Mr. Coleman said he had survived in a precarious field by keeping several projects going at once. ''City of Angels'' took eight years to complete, but even as it was being readied for Broadway, ''Welcome to the Club,'' on which he collaborated with A. E. Hotchner, opened and closed last spring. The composer has also been working steadily on two other projects. ''Ziegfeld Presents Will Rogers,'' with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and ''The Life,'' with lyrics by Ira Gassman.
Meanwhile, ''City of Angels'' is shaping up as perhaps the most successful show of Mr. Coleman's career. ''I'm only just now starting to accept the fact that the show is a success,'' he said. ''The cracks are opening and the light is just beginning to come through.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/theater/city-of-angels-songs-echo-the-jazzy-youth-of-their-composer.html
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