‘City of Angels’ fails to animate pretty pictures

Put upon screenwriter Stine (Jeffrey Brian Adams) and the protagonist in his film noir script, a gumshoe named Stone (Brandon Dahlquist), have been living their lives in parallel — simultaneously bedding dames and weathering blows to their careers.

[...] if in storyboard it sounds beautiful for this private eye and his creator to confront each other, under Bill English’s direction the two characters on whom these songs center feel chosen at random from the show’s ensemble, more an afterthought than a unifying concept.

If Adams is strong as Stine — he helps build his character just from his discerning decisions about whether to belt or whisper his sustained notes with his pure tenor — Dahlquist makes a slack Stone.

Scenes that should drip with desire feel desultory, as when femme fatale Alaura (Nancy Zoppi, as superb with comic timing as she is with musical phrasing) seduces him into taking her case, a convoluted yarn about her missing stepdaughter; the details you don’ t need to pay much attention to.

By contrast, Monique Hafen, a regular in San Francisco Playhouse musicals, makes such a showstopper out of “You Can Always Count on Me,” about how both she and her avatar in Stine’s script always play Plain Jane, that you yearn for her to have more air time.

The scenes that take place in the movie that Stine is writing are all set on a higher level upstage, framed by what resembles the border of celluloid film stock.

(English also designed the set.) Behind the film-within-a-play characters are black-and-white projections (by Theodore J.H. Hulsker) that set the scenes — seedy Hollywood streets, a house of ill repute.

The whole design takes advantage of what film and theater each uniquely afford: the perfectly framed compositions of light and shadow you can achieve in a movie frame, with the magical suspension of disbelief, the flights of imagination, that are possible only with live performance.