The
musical's plot owes more than a tip of its cowboy hat to The Petrified
Forest, the 1936 film in which Humphrey Bogart first wowed audiences
by playing a menacing gangster who took hostage the patrons and employees
at a small-town café. Here, the gangster is a guitar-playing stranger
who's on the run, and decides to take cover in an Arizona roadside diner
named the Daydream
Café.
There's much music and laughter, until
one by one, the stranger forces the diner's inhabitants to face the truth
of their lives.
