Tony Yazbeck and Ben Jacoby in City of Angels. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The 1989 City of Angels is one of the wittiest and most original musicals ever written. Its brilliant book by Larry Gelbart, one of America’s premier comic voices throughout a storied career, is simultaneously a musical parody of a film noir and a delectably cynical treatment of Hollywood, set in the golden era of noirs, the late 1940s. The frame story is about a successful detective novelist named Stine who lands a contract to turn one of his books into a movie, and learns the tough lessons that all the literary successes who fell for Hollywood’s tin promises had to swallow in the big-studio era, about ego, betrayal, manipulation and the bottom line. Stine considers himself too wised-up to be fooled, yet he falls for the phony geniality of the producer-director, Buddy Fidler, who softens him up with praise and then rewrites page after page of his screenplay. Buddy is a megalomaniac with a will of solid steel. And Stine is ripe for seduction – by the money, by the notion of seeing his private-eye hero, Stone, on the screen, and by the sex that hangs in the Hollywood air. His sharp-eyed editor wife Gabby opts to stay behind in New York, though she knows that her husband is historically susceptible to the appeal of available young women, and when he takes Buddy’s secretary Donna to bed Gabby sees through his attempts to cover his tracks. One of the best songs in the sensational Cy Coleman-David Zippel score, “It Needs Work,” musicalizes the moment when she tosses it in his face. The other half of the show is a series of scenes from the movie Stine is writing and Fidler is shooting, so Stine and Stone divide the leading man role, and most of the supporting players are double cast. The musical’s winning visual trick is that the Stine story is designed in color while the film-within-the-play scenes are in glistening black and white.

Though City of Angels won six Tonys and eight Drama Desk Awards, it isn’t often revived because it’s a huge show, complicated to design and to stage. The Ogunquit Playhouse has gone all out in its new production, which runs through August 22. It’s visually sumptuous, with scenic design by Nate Bertone and costumes by Jen Caprio that are poised right on the cusp of period recreation and fanciful stylization. (The fact that post-war style is so remote from us three-quarters of a century later that it might almost be science-fiction is a fine boost to these talented artists.) Bryce Cutler devised the video and projections, which meld with Bertone’s sets so inventively that some of the stage images are models of trompe l’oeil, like a gazebo on the estate of the millionaire in the noir plot who lives in an iron lung under the dubious care of his amorous much younger wife. The shifts in and out of a Technicolor palette are great fun from the outset, and as the show proceeds they become more ingenious and audacious: at one point, late in the second act, the color drips onto the monochrome to move us back into the frame story. And José Santiago’s lighting is so clever that at some moments you swear you can hear him chuckle at his own effects.

The problem is that the director, Hunter Foster, gets carried away. He’s got hold of superlative material that can hardly be improved upon, but he can’t resist trying, and whenever he does he cheapens it – with clips of Buddy (Stephen DeRosa) posing as characters in his own picture, for instance, or bits of drag. There’s too damn much embroidery. The farce scenes are clumsy and amateurish, and they kiss up to the audience. Foster knows how to direct the more intimate scenes in the Stine sections, but he can’t find the right tone for the movie parts: either they’re overplayed or they lie flat. The noir sections are parody but they’re not written as burlesque. And even in the Hollywood section, whenever Foster has to fill the stage, he sinks right back into the trap of making them showy and synthetic. At Buddy Fidler’s party, the efforts of the starlet who plays the millionaire’s daughter (whose disappearance touches off the Stone plot) to persuade Stine to build up her part are way over the top. It’s a shame, because we’ve already seen how good Bella Serrano, who doubles these roles, can be in her “Lost and Found” number near the end of act one. Riley Wasson plays Jimmy Powers, the radio crooner who is sleeping with the movie’s female star, Fidler’s wife Carla (Lili Thomas, who doubles as the femme fatale she plays in the picture), and he’s so smarmy and obvious. Moreover, he doesn’t come close to locating the laid-back style of the sexy signature ballad, “Stay with Me,” that Coleman and Zippel wrote for him. Here Foster needed to do more research: Powers was inspired by Dick Powell, the baby-faced vocalist of the Busby Berkeley film musicals of the thirties who became the hard-boiled hero of noirs and other action pictures in the forties.

Despite all this extraneous effort, the Ogunquit City of Angels manages to be quite entertaining. The voices are excellent and so is the musical direction by Jeffrey Campos, and I liked every one of the major players except DeRosa, who clowns his way through Buddy’s scenes. It must be said in his defense that the role is extremely tricky; in four professional mountings of the musical, the only performer I’ve seen pull it off was Rene Auberjonois, who created it on Broadway.

Ben Jacoby brings just the right combination of sexual adventurousness and stumblebum embarrassment to the part of Stine. The joke at the heart of the relationship between him and his fictional creation is that Stone (played by Tony Yazbeck) makes the kind of conquests Stine would like to equal, but whenever Stine cheats on his wife, whom he really loves, his guilt defeats him. Stine’s emotional peak comes in the eleven o’clock number “Funny,” a perilously difficult solo that Jacoby delivers superbly. I wasn’t familiar with Jacoby’s work, but I had seen Yazbeck, who plays Stone, as Gaby in On the Town, first at Barrington Stage and then on Broadway, and he’s a first-rate musical-theatre performer. Stone, whom Gelbart and Zippel whipped up with ingredients from Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, is a reach for Yazbeck, and on opening night he didn’t move the character safely into his comfort zone until the middle of the first act, but he got there all right. The first act of the musical ends, gloriously, with Stone crossing the barrier between fiction and reality: when Stine backs down on the set upon seeing the dreadful alterations Buddy has made to one of his scenes, Stone responds with disgust. It’s the moment we’ve been waiting for – a duet between the writer and his creation called “You’re Nothing Without Me.” Jacoby and Yazbeck hit every mark: they act, sing and dance the number with style and assurance.

Alysha Umphress and the company of City of Angels. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The women who move in and out of the two narratives are played by Serrano and Thomas, whom I’ve already mentioned; Alysha Umphress as Gabby and Bobbi, who has broken Stone’s heart; and Danielle Wade as Donna and Oolie, Stone’s faithful girl Friday, who holds a hopeless torch for him, just as Lee Patrick’s Effie Perine languishes for Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Their performances all have high points, but “The Tennis Song,” the femme fatale Alaura Kingsley’s double entendre-loaded duet with Stone, needs tamping down – this is another directorial mistake – because Zippel’s lyrics do so much of the work that underlining them merely gilds the lily. Umphress is just what the role of Gabby needs: she’s warm and tough in equal parts. My only quibble about her Bobbi is with the vocal stylings she’s tacked onto the end of the score’s most gorgeous song, “With Every Breath I Take”: Umphress has a lovely, bittersweet alto, ideal for the ballad – there’s no need for her to show off her range. Wade is a perfect match for both Oolie and Donna; she knocks Oolie’s number “You Can Always Count on Me” out of the park. When she and Umphress duet early in the first act on “What You Don’t Know About Women,” the result is pure pleasure.

The Coleman-Zippel score has so many highlights that you lose count. One is “All You Have to Do Is Wait,” sung by the cop, Muñoz, Stone’s old partner from his days in the LAPD. Stone left the force under a cloud when Bobbi’s other lover got shot; that’s when he hung out a shingle as a shamus. But Muñoz is sure he’s guilty and has been dogging him ever since. Omar Lopez-Cepero does full justice to the song in this production. The quartet that backs up Jimmy Powers and provides nifty musical scene transitions is called the Angel City 4 and consists of Meghan Olivia Corbett, Rick Faugno, Sam Foti and Aaron Michel Ray. They’re another bonus (except when Foster can’t resist camping them up) and Ray contributes a red-hot sax solo. Everyone who loves musicals should seize the opportunity to see City of Angels. I only wish that Foster had trusted the show.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.