Theodore Johnson, also known as Armpit, his nickname at Camp Green Lake Juvenile Correctional Facility, has a very good head on his shoulders.

Sachar does a great job developing the characters’ backgrounds in the first few chapters and there are quite a few underlying themes amongst the characters that the reader can easily catch. Small Steps really focuses on four equally distinct characters: Armpit, X-Ray, Kaira, and Ginny. Another example is when Sachar was describing Kaira, he just went on to say, “Kaira DeLeon, a seventeen-year-old African-American girl, was just waking up.” The author’s bluntness sets the tone for the rest of the novel in a successful way. For example, Sachar mentions that when Armpit was walking on the sidewalk, a Caucasian adult male suddenly crossed the street in front of him, in obvious allusion to Armpit’s skin color.

Sachar is not afraid to describe characters who they really are, including their race, their attitude, and their internal motives. It exposits indices for the 1940s and the classic Hollywood era, all pointing toward a framework where the musical comedy can function as a cultural history.In Small Steps by multiple-award winner Louis Sachar, the style of writing is very straightforward, has very little dialect, and is sometimes brutally honest. The essay is organized along archetypal lines, namely the private investigator and femme fatale, to show how those models inform the show’s gendered characterization. Where relevant, I engage with histories, music theory, and non-scholarly publications for social context and reception. Those traits are measured against City of Angels as a work, primarily musically but also in its lyrics and dialogue, using frameworks presented within the work of Raymond Knapp, Stacy Wolf, Scott McMillin, and other scholars of musical theatre. My methodology looks to literary criticism and philosophy written on both film noir and hardboiled fiction for theorization on the core elements of those genres. This essay explores the connections between these idiosyncratic forms of entertainment, particularly in the ways that noir devices and tropes emerge from songs penned by Cy Coleman and David Zippel, to reach a greater understanding of the ways in which City of Angels depicts and comments on the cultural history of film noir. City of Angels (1989) uniquely transforms the structural, thematic, and visual elements of film noir through the conventions of musical comedy and thereby subjects both genres to affectionate satire.

Louis sachar small steps