Hello Again to the Long Goodbye

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

CITY OF ANGELS Music by Cy Coleman; Lyrics by David Zippel

Book by Larry Gelbart

The ballad throbs to a climax, the two singers look at each other in a confession of mutual need, and the title line of mock-bragging devotion, You're Nothing Without Me, reverberates from the rafters. All in all, a classic first-act finale -- except that in this musical the characters who vow undying fidelity are a nerdy novelist turned screenwriter and the hard-boiled detective he has created on page and celluloid.

That quirky, funny, oddly thrilling moment epitomizes the twofold cleverness of City of Angels, which opened on Broadway last week. The show pays honest homage to the pop-culture traditions of stage, cinema, radio and recording studio (especially those of the '40s, when it is set), yet brings them together in a fashion that feels fresh and new. Nostalgia plus novelty is a notoriously volatile cocktail, but Angels has the impeccably elegant fizz of champagne.

Perhaps its most remarkable attainment is that the premise and structure, which sound inordinately egghead when described, are easy to grasp in performance. The action begins with the detective (James Naughton), a rumpled knight of the tenderloin who lives by a code of honor in a world of thugs and well-heeled thieves. Moments later the story shifts to the office (coyly labeled a "cell") where his creator labors as a hireling of a movie tycoon more crass, smug and fascinatingly awful than any envisioned by Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward, as if a film were being rewound, until they are back in position to perform the new bowdlerized version.

As the script unfolds, it becomes clear that the characters in the detective plot are all based on the people around the writer at the studio -- indeed, the same actors play both sets of roles. This connection leads to countless comic effects. In the splashiest, the perennially disappointed "other woman" (Randy Graff) of both plot lines switches characters, costumes and locales in mid-song, all without missing a beat of her ferociously funny lament, You Can Always Count on Me.

The detective plot borrows classic elements from the likes of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye: a missing girl (Rachel York) who turns up, clad only in a sheet and beckoning for comfort, on the detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed by the wit and humanity of David Zippel's lyrics and the zip of Cy Coleman's score, which delights in the past without sinking to pastiche except, maybe, in the close- harmony numbers of a group resembling the Modernaires.

City of Angels is that rarest of things on Broadway these days, a completely $ original American musical, not imported, not adapted from something else and not a recycling of bygone songs. Coming at the end of a decade of almost nonstop doomsaying, it proves that Broadway's signature style of show is, in the right hands, as viable and valuable as ever.