FREUD'S 'CITY OF ANGELS' A HEAVEN-SENT EXPERIENCE.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

HOW EASY it is to forget what kind of amazing feats can be accomplished in two short weeks. And how expertly the UCLA-based Reprise! company is able to offer up a reminder. One classy production after the next.

Just opened at the Freud Playhouse is ``City of Angels,'' the Cy Coleman and David Zippel tale of a novelist-turned-Hollywood-screenwriter and the noirish gumshoe tome he's turning into a film. A popular but stylistically tricky show to mount even in its original 1989 form, ``Angels,'' in Reprise! hands, is not an inch less accomplished for being ever so slightly scaled down in production components.

And, as previously mentioned, what's on stage at the Freud took about two weeks to bring together. Two weeks' worth of performances later, it will be a sweet memory.

As in many Reprise! efforts, an audience watches veterans of the Broadway musical theater scene working side by side with the next generation. The ``Angels'' lineup, featuring the likes of Stephen Bogardus, Vicki Lewis, Burke Moses and Tami Tappan Damiano is crackerjack. Director Joe Leonardo - assisted here by casting director Julia Flores - takes full advantage of an embarrassment of performance riches.

Most of the players are called upon for double duty. As '40s scribe Stine (Bogardus, reprising the role he played when he was in the first L.A. company) drops his pants adapting his crime novel to celluloid, all of the people in his life (wife, mistress, actors, movie producer) are transplanted into the film. Which we see.

That film - concerning a missing dame and lots of dough - is also staged. Stine and studio are in color; the ``film'' story - thanks to Alex Jaeger's careful costuming and Tom Ruzika's lighting - is in black and white. When Stine hits the backspace key on his typewriter, the players ``rewind'' and move backward. Gimmicky? Not in the slightest, and extremely easy to follow even with minimal space for definition. (Matching posters, one in color, the other not, help remind us which scene we're in.)

But the construction makes for a workout for the actors. Lewis, playing both Stine's mistress and the secretary to gumshoe Stone (Moses) in the film, has barely a whisper to change costumes when called upon to sing ``You Can Always Count on Me'' as two different characters in two different contexts. She is, as it happens, dynamite in both incarnations.

Moses, square-jawed and stoic, is winningly hard-boiled as the private dick who loses patience with both the case he's tracking and the writer who has foisted it all upon him. His disgust culminates in the terrific first-act duet ``You're Nothing Without Me,'' expertly sung with Bogardus.

And, oh yes, that splendid music. Lyricist Zippel is still around to admire his handiwork on ``Angels,'' as is book writer Larry Gelbart, but musical theater lost a cornerstone with the death of Cy Coleman two years ago. The score, jazzy, melodic with lots of clever duets, is given a fine rendering here via Gerald Sternbach's musical direction and the always excellent Reprise! Band.

It should not go unremarked upon that ``City of Angels'' is the first Reprise! production since the departure of founding artistic director Marcia Seligson, who went on to pursue other projects. Her contributions to the birth and development of Reprise! cannot be measured, but if ``Angels'' is any indication, the company has been left in able hands.

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

CITY OF ANGELS - Three and one half stars

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Westwood.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through Feb. 5.

Tickets: $70 to $75. Call [phone].

In a nutshell: A terrific musical brought back for scaled-down, but no less exciting, treatment.

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Photo:

Gumshoe Stone (Burke Moses) looks over a dame played by Alli Mauzey in the Reprise! production of the musical ``City of Angels'' at the Freud Playhouse in Westwood.