• Best Musical
• Leading Actor - James Naughton (also played Billy Flynn in Chicago)
• Featured Actress - Randy Graff
• Best Book
• Best Score
• Scenic Design - Robin Wagner

Return to Top

(Prologue: Theme From City of Angels), that incorporates orchestra, scat vocals, and a suitably world-weary voice-over by Stone that plunges us into the realm of 1940's detective movies.

As the curtain rises, Stone lies on a hospital gurney with a bullet in his shoulder and a lot on his mind. A tough private eye in the tradition of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, Stone also suffers from a broken heart (owing to a weakness for beautiful women) and an empty wallet (he's too moral to take dishonest jobs).

Stone flashes back to a week earlier, when his secretary with a "heart of gold", Oolie, ushers in a rich, beautiful woman named Alaura Kingsley. Alaura claims she wants Stone to find her missing stepdaughter, Mallory. Against his better judgement he takes the case. Just as we're becoming intrigued...

A man at a typewriter appears on stage, and the actors are suddenly backing up "rewinding", and playing the scene with a few changes. The man, we discover, is Stine, author of popular detective novels starring Stone, on which he is now adapting for his first screenplay. What we've seen comes straight from his imagination.

Like Stone, Stine has a weakness for women, but fewer scruples when it comes to money. At the moment, the money is coming from Buddy Fiddler, Hollywood mogul and master puppeteer of creative people. Something's telling Stine to watch out but for now, he's just enjoying the ride. (Double Talk).

Back at Stine's hotel room, we learn that the misgivings come mostly from his wife, Gabby, who wishes Stine would stick to novels. He won't listen though, any more than Stone will, and we begin to see the interplay between "reality" and fiction as Gabby and Oolie lament (What You Don't Know About Women).

The Mystery resumes, with Stone alone in his dreary bungalow, listening to crooner Jimmy Powers and the Angel City 4 brightly telling their radio audience, (You Gotta Look Out For Yourself), which takes on a certain poignancy when two hoods, Sonny and Big Six, break down his door and beat him up.

Cut to Buddy reading this scene in the screenplay: we see that his secretary, Donna, is the model for Oolie, and that Buddy can't help "fiddling" with everything. (The Buddy System).

Back to Stone, out cold, being rudely awakened by LAPD Lt. Munoz, who was Stone's partner on the force but now bears him a major grudge. Stone, it seems, loved a low rent lounge singer named Bobbi (Stine based her on Gabby), whom we see performing a torchy ballad (With Every Breath I Take). Bobbi wanted stardom more than marriage, and when Stone caught her with a Hollywood producer (based on Buddy), tempers flared, a gun went off, and the producer was dead of a "heart attack" caused by two bullets. Munoz has never forgiven Stone for "getting away" with murder, and would gladly nail him for jaywalking. Stone, angry about the beating, confronts Alaura at her mansion and meets several unsavoury characters, including her lustful stepson, Peter Kingsley, her war-profiteer husband, Luther Kingsley, (an elderly man stricken with polio and encased in an iron lung), and the quack spiritualist, Dr. Mandril, who attends him. Greed and malice hover like smog, but Alaura's considerable charms (and bankroll) keep Stone on the case. (The Tennis Song).

Stone fruitlessly pursues the "missing" stepdaughter, Mallory (Ev'rybody's Gotta Be Somewhere), only to find her waiting in his bed (the provocative Lost and Found). Stone somehow manages to resist temptation... which is more than can be said for his creator. His wife having returned to New York, Stine takes comfort in Donna's bed, although not without some guilt. But afterall, this is Hollywood, where no one's motives are pure.

As Stone quickly learns, when a photographer breaks in, snaps him with Mallory, and she runs off with his gun, which is used to murder the quack. Stone finds himself framed for the killing and gleefully arrested by Munoz. (All You Have To Do Is Wait).

Not that Stine is having a great time either. Buddy is butchering his script, his conscience is nagging, and Stone, his own creation, is disgusted with him. The curtain falls with each of them arguing to a swinging big band accompaniment (You're Nothing Without Me).

Act II opens in a recording studio, where Jimmy Powers and the Angel City 4 are waxing (Stay With Me), which then becomes a record playing in...whose bedroom? It looks like Alaura's but proves to belong to Carla Haywood, Buddy's wife, who'll play Alaura in the movie.

Stone meanwhile, languishes in jail, attended only by Oolie, who like her alter ego, Donna, is feeling used by men (You Can Always Count on Me). Stone is mysteriously bailed out, but the two hoods catch up with him and nearly blow him up before he neatly turns the tables.

Stine has troubles of his own. Lonely at a lavish Hollywood party of Buddy's sycophants, including a typical Hollywood composer (Alaura's Theme), Stine calls home only to find that Gabby has discovered his affair with Donna. He flies to New York with an elaborately prepared excuse, but she's not buying it (It Needs Work).

Stone fighting now to clear his name, is led to a brothel (LA Blues), where he is stunned to find Bobbi. We learn it was she who shot the producer, Stone has been covering for her all this time. Together they face the wreckage of their love (With Every Breath I Take).

Oolie meanwhile, has made her own discovery: Alaura is a fortune hunter who has already murdered one rich husband and planned to do away with this one, once she had eliminated his son, daughter and doctor. Stone confronts her at the mansion; they grapple for her gun; shots ring out...and Alaura falls dead, Stone's gravely wounded, and we're back where we started. But where does that leave Stine? His wife has rejected him, his lover, Donna, has (he learns) also been rewriting his script; Stine faces the collapse of his real and fictive worlds, and his emotions take over, his wit turns bitter (Funny).

When he arrives on the movie set to find that Buddy's name appears above his own on the screenplay, and that the shallow crooner Jimmy Powers will play Stone, Stine boils over. With the "real" Stone, his conscience, finally leading him to make the right choice, he rages at Buddy, gets himself fired, and is about to be pounded by two security guards when - in the imagination all things are possible - Stone somehow appears at Stine's typewriter and writes him the fighting skills of a superhero, then tacks on a "Hollywood ending" in which Gabby returns, forgiving all. Together they celebrate (I'm nothing Without You) as the curtain falls.

The evening doesn't end there; we leave as we entered, with band swinging (Epilogue: Theme From City of Angels and Double Talk Walk) to an emphatic coda.

In the words of Raymond Chandler . . .

"...Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective...must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world...He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him."

Return to Top