Stage

...Jessep, the unit's Melville-quoting commander, condemn himself on the stand...

...One is the corruption plot in which the author of a presumably classy private-eye novel-literature in a genre disguise-comes to Hollywood to see his work put on the screen and is seduced by the system, almost losing his integrity and his wife in the process...

...If there is a thematic point to all this (the unreality of the real...

...The other is the private-eye story, told and retold as the producer tones down the original...

...STAGE OF MEN & ANGELS 'CITY' & 'A FEW GOOD MEN' Molly Haskell began her recent rumination on movie adaptations of novels (New York Times Book Review, January 28,1990) by conjuring "those two archenemies of the thirties and forties, the Vulgarian Producer and the Sensitive Writer," and then laying them to rest...

...The assumption of A Few Good Men is that you do not need a slightly demented professional marine to keep us from being overrun by the Cuban hordes (the murder takes place at Guantanamo Bay...

...Dashiell Hammett...

...Gelbart, who began as a gagman in radio, is not central casting's idea of "the Sensitive Writer," but Mervyn Rothstein's New York Times Magazine interview (October 8,1989) suggests that the musical is "a reaction to Gelbart's anger" about the quarrel over who contributed what to Tootsie...

...Kaffee succeeds by letting Lt...

...Example: he removes a fierce speech by the Hispanic detective whose motivation grows out of his outsider's sense of the wrongs done him...

...Hold on now, wouldn't the point of a musical, even with a Gelbart book, be its music...

...Cy Coleman has, as usual, written a vigorous score, but with a few exceptions-"Hey, Look Me Over" from Wildcat, "If My Friends Could See Me Now" from Sweet Charity-I have difficulty remembering Coleman songs, even the ones in City of Angels, which I saw only a month before I rolled this sheet of paper into my typewriter...

...Distant echoes of Clifford Odets's The Big Knife...

...at another, Randy Graff moves between sets singing "You Can Always Count on Me" in both her roles-Stein's sweetie, Stone's secretary...

...I prefer to think not, and Gelbart's setting the show "in the late 1940s" seems to indicate that, if there is trouble in Movie City, it belongs to those back-then days...

...The real difficulty is the Gelbart book...

...Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, at the Music Box, Broadway's straight play for this sea-son, may seem an odd partner to City of Angels, but A Few Good Men is old-fash-ioned in its own way...

...Once, when I was a guest lecturer at West Point, I watched a group of officers carry a table down the hallway, chanting the march of the Wicked Witch's troops from The Wizard of Oz...

...He is his father's son, however...

...he does save the marines-first persuading them to allow him to save them-with the help of two other officer-lawyers, a dedicated but inexperienced woman, and a Jewish liberal who, seeing the murder as ethnically motivated (the victim is Puerto Rican), at first wants to see the two men found guilty...

...At A Few Good Men I began to think that the military court had set up shop in a moving van...

...Of course, the happy ending in which Stine (the writer) and Stone (his hero) join forces to defeat "the Vulgarian Producer" might be seen as Gelbart's getting a bit of his own back...

...He recently did a commendable job on Jonathan Marco Sherman's Women and Wallace on PBS's American Playhouse (January 31) by staging the fragments that make up the play as separate pieces...

...the producer is right in this case although his substitution is pure cliche...

...it is lost in the Pirandellian good clean fun...

...Don Scardino's direction is particularly annoying...

...Can it be that there is seriousness beneath the glitz and gimmickry of City of Angels...

...Rhyming "celibate" with "hell a bit" may not be up to the best Lorenz Hart standard ("when you love your lover, let/blue skies be your coverlet"), but it does indicate the league in which Zippel wants to play...

...The marines, counting cadence, march as they shift tables and chairs, but the rhythm is less than hypnotic...

...There are two plots in City of Angels...

...Both plots are conventional and both are kidded...

...They are defended by Lt...

...Here, we are back in Caine Mutiny country, although Sorkin spares us Herman Wouk's coda, in which Queeg is praised as America's first line of defense by the lawyer who broke him...

...A Few Good Men is similarly constructed, although Sorkin's short scenes, some only a few sentences long, are strung on a clearer narrative line...

...Tom Hulce is relentlessly cute as Kaffee and Stephen Joyce's Jessep is all physical and verbal tics...

...David Zippel goes for tricky lyrics...

...The production does not help...

...There are funny lines, as one would expect from Gelbart, but for the most part, when the music falls silent, when the reality games are not in action, we are left with familiar Hollywood satire, obvious private-eye parody, and two tedious plots...

...The play is interesting on a what-happens-next basis, but it is essentially as shallow as City of Angels, peopled as it is by stereotypes...

...Thou shouldst be living at this hour...

...Presumably in an attempt to keep the production fluid, Scardino bridges between segments by letting the audience see in the half-light the performers assuming new positions and the props being moved to form new settings...

...As it happens, they are alive and doing very well on Broadway at the Virginia in the new musical, City of Angels, by Larry Gelbart (book), Cy Coleman (music), and David Zippel (lyrics...

...A writer who does not know that the seriousness in a novel-private-eye or not-lies in its milieu, its characters, its structure, and not in rhetorical intrusions is in trouble before he gets to Hollywood...

...It was a fine theatrical moment, but, then, it happened only once...

...g.) Kaffee, a naval officer whose playful behavior shields him from his late father's reputation as a trial lawyer, one that he suspects he can never approximate...

...Both actors have been highly praised and audiences clearly admire their excesses, but for me they manage only to emphasize the play's weaknesses...

...It is a courtroom drama in which two marines are the willing scapegoats for the death of a young man, a complainer whose lack of esprit threatens his unit's image...

...GERALD WEALES...

...They are there for the sake of the musical's chief device, the interpenetration of the real (so to speak) and the fictional worlds, which is underlined by having performers (except for Stine and Stone) double in the two stories...

...At one point, characters from the two worlds-Stein's wife, Stone's secretary-sing a duet ("What You Don't Know about Women...