Pennies from Heaven was a godsend that radically changed the musical. Here, Steve Martin plays Arthur, a loveable loser who peddles sheet music for a living. The songs, all Hit Parade faves, recapitulate his hankering for a life better than Depression-era Chicago. “There must be someplace where the songs are real,” he says to his mousy wife Joan (Jessica Harper), a bitter prude without a dream of her own. On the road, he meets the voluptuous Eileen (a Boopish Bernadette Peters) and wistfully croons “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” sounding every bit like Bing Crosby. In playwright Dennis Potter's rousing reinvention of the genre, the songs are no longer penned and recorded for the stage or screen; they are lifted from pop culture and lip-synched. This strange ventriloquism propels the story with great verve, at the same time illustrating how popular culture inhabits our imagination. In a provocative usurpation of the past, Arthur and Eileen become Fred and Ginger restaging in lush detail “Let's Face the Music and Dance,” but then the music stops.