Clichés inevitable in likening cities

There are two destinations where dreamers go to pursue wealth and fame: If you’re reading this, you’ve probably chosen Los Angeles. The other city, LA’s older sibling, still serves as a destination for wide-eyed youths yearning to make it big: New York City, which, on this side of the country, can inspire either wonder and excitement or a slew of cuss words.

Of course, as is inevitable with siblings, there is a marked degree of rivalry between the two satellite cities. When simplified to mere snapshots of each other, Los Angeles and New York City represent totally opposite and incompatible ways of life. But as disparate as the cities appear, in some strange and unexpected moments, the two cities can come together in mystical unison.

When Angelenos visit the Big Apple, they expect to find the cliché New York City crafted in Hollywood back lots for films like Ghostbusters, Sex and the City and The Godfather. But surprisingly, a piece of Los Angeles can be found on Broadway, playing full blast in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

Tony-nominated jukebox musical Rock of Ages threatened to “melt [my] face” with its songbook filled with mid-to-late ’80s arena rock — the thrusting, soaring kind the entire graduate school and the elder half of the undergraduate population was conceived to.

This hokey musical follows the story of a young, wannabe rocker Drew, played by the disconcertingly tall American Idol alumnus and LA-manufactured quasi-celeb Constantine Maroulis, and his unemployed actor love interest, Sherrie (played by fresh-faced Kerry Butler), who come to Los Angeles from middle America to, expectedly, get famous.

This plot is a familiar motif to New York City-based musicals as well — think of 42nd Street — but Broadway’s take on the Sunset Strip as a lawless, inefficient and hedonistic city where fragile souls can fall by the wayside is a syncretic production of city spirits.

Musicals are synonymous with the New York City character, and seeing that vision of its sister city as a loud, unoriginal but thoroughly pleasurable spectacle blends both cities’ stereotypical characteristics with the aid of some screaming guitar and good old Poison.

Rock of Ages isn’t just a love story, though — Drew and his cronies have to fight against European developers that have bribed corrupt LA politicians in order to knock out Sunset Boulevard’s rock clubs, including the famous one Drew sweeps the floor of, the Bourbon Room. Regina (Lauren Molina), the city’s Berkeley import, rallies her fellow Angelenos to bring the noise and protest the threat to this sacred institutions of binge drinking, inappropriate behavior in bathroom stalls and men with very tight and very sparkly pants.

This image of dated, silly excess as the essence of Los Angeles isn’t new, but the fact that it has been brought to a New York City stage and recognized in the snooty Tony Award circle is an admission to LA’s shared values with New York City. Though the musical’s fluffy yet hopeful show did not garner any Tony wins, the nominations meant an admission that maybe LA culture isn’t so bad.

The two cities have more in common than some of its dwellers would like to admit. There are characteristics that all urban places share, like the poverty, social stratification and age-old grime that pervades the city: graffiti-laden walls.

But it’s New York City’s iconic visual vocabulary that has cemented itself in the minds of society because of its emotional stimulus on the human conscious. It’s a city not built on rock‘n’roll and excess like Los Angeles, but a city with all sorts of people coexisting in cramped quarters and subway schedules, speaking in all sorts of languages at once. We’ve seen and heard New York City as a state of mind, a musical wonder, a runaway’s anonymous oasis and site for natural disaster, horrible crime and as a destructible playground for all sorts of giant monsters, faithfully presented by Hollywood.

Los Angeles and New York City have the same conception of each other as dirty, cracked and decrepit — inferior in some way or another. Los Angeles lacks real culture, while New York City lacks nature; Los Angeles has no organization while New York City has too much. They have theater and opera, while we have faultlines and TV tapings.

But where both cities come together is a love of an entertainment that moves, of images that influence and of symphonies that do their best to transform. We juxtapose the highbrow and lowbrow: The bustling pretzel cart across the way from the New York City Ballet is just like the ubiquitous “death dog” vendor that feed the season-ticket holding execs outside of the Staples Center. The same street musician plays the soundtrack of the end of our nights, a weary, wistful saxophone, guitar or harmonica riffing on a popular song recognized in both cities.

Sure, one man’s elevator is another’s freeway, one coast’s biweekly surf is another’s Central Park jog and one city’s farmers’ market is another’s Dean and Deluca, but the two feed on each other for the stories both cities love to tell to the rest of America. They are the two voices that the country looks to for inspiration.

So play nice, New York City and Los Angeles. No matter how you get to work or what books you read, you’ll find yourself singing along to the same cheesy song, remembering your own dreams and why you chose your city in the first place.

Clare Sayas is a junior majoring in public relations. Her column, “Lost & Found,” runs Thursdays.