Futilely Seeking Spectacle in New B’way Musicals

This was going to be the season that the Broadway musical made a comeback. Maybe so. “City of Angels” got strong reviews and will have a healthy run at the Virginia Theater, and “Grand Hotel” is not going to have to check out of the Martin Beck next week.

In performance, however, neither show ignites an audience the way--I hate to say this--”Phantom of the Opera” does. This may very well have to do with the cost of tickets on Broadway these days. This season’s top ticket is $55. Having laid out $110 for two orchestra seats, the viewer and his companion are ready to undergo a major experience, not just enjoy a good show.

So, it’s a bit of a comedown when Larry Gelbart’s “City of Angels” turns out to be merely a witty sendup of Hollywood’s B movies and C movie executives, to a neat jazz score by Cy Coleman. And it’s a puzzle that “Grand Hotel’s” revolving-door choreography (by Tommy Tune) seems to deposit the audience out on the street two hours later with nothing to take back to the hotel but the program.

Each show, in other words, is over when it’s over. That used to be enough for the Broadway visitor. If you couldn’t get tickets to “South Pacific,” you would settle for “Hazel Flagg.” But unreasonable prices have bred unreasonable expectations. Too bad. Taken on their own terms, “City of Angels” and “Grand Hotel” offer their own pleasures--rather different ones.

The first musical is basically a word-show. That’s not to put down Coleman’s score, which harks back to the cool sounds of the Hi-Lo’s and the torchy sounds of, oh, Jane Froman. Nor do we mean to ignore the Robin Wagner settings and the rest of the show’s design, which is to die for, especially if you are into old movies and late-1940s Hollywood decor. One speaks of black-and-white films, but lighting designer Paul Gallow reminds us that they were really in blue-and-white. But Gelbart’s book is the real energy source for “City of Angels.” Actually, it’s two books at once: the private-dick flick that new-to-Hollywood writer Gregg Edelman is trying to wrest from his own novel, and Edelman’s real-life adventures getting his script past his awful producer-director--Rene Auberjonois at his fox-in-the-chicken-coop best.

Funny stuff, whether the private-eye (James Naughton) is untangling a hoity-toity dame from her fake story (Dee Hoty), or whether the writer is trying to cope with the same dame--i.e., the actress who’ll play her in the movie--at one of those Hollywood brunches. This part of the show is in color, but the kissy-kissy dialogue is just as rococo as the gumshoe stuff, and it strikes you that these people too are acting out a movie--”The Bad and the Beautiful,” perhaps.

Gelbart wants us to take his brunch bunch seriously, however. Yes, they are cartoons--the tramp starlet, the sold-out composer--but they also suggest the price that a writer of integrity must pay when he sups with the devil. When Gelbart gets righteous about such matters, the show gets corny. But generally, it’s smart enough to stay on the surface, playing word-games with the detective genre and slyly noting how writers have a way of working their own lives into the plot. Gelbart’s “Hollywood ending” has the private eye and the writer ganging up on Auberjonois right in the middle of his sound stage, but we don’t have to believe it, and probably shouldn’t.

It’s an amusing, highly stylish pastiche, without a moment’s involvement, barring some slight sympathy for Randy Graff, who plays Effie to the detective’s Sam Spade and does even more for the writer, to no reward. We like her, love Auberjonois, the rascal, admire the ingenuity of the concept and execution--and realize that, for all this, the show is basically a trifle.

“Grand Hotel” leaves the same impression, and that’s strange, for it goes for big emotions. Birth, death, sex, robbery, stock fraud--everything happens at “Grand Hotel.” And it happens without a pause.

Tune’s choreography makes the show one long, whirling sweep through a gold and black ballroom, now this face etched in the spotlight now that. (The most prominent faces: Liliane Montevecchi as a burned-out ballerina, David Carroll as a well-born jewel thief, Jane Krakowski as a typist who can’t possibly live on the money she makes from that.)

The story gets told and the score (by Robert Wright and George Forest with additional material by Maury Yeston) is rousingly sung. But by the time the cast assembles for the curtain call, one realizes that essentially that is what “Grand Hotel” has been all evening, one long, beautifully staged curtain call. Very nice. Very entertaining. Now . . . where should we eat?