Bullets Over Broadway at the St. James Theatre
L-R: Vincent Pastore, Heléne York, Nick Cordero, Marin Mazzie, Brooks Ashmankas, Zach Braff, Lenny Wolpe, and Betsy Wolfe in Bullets Over Broadway.
Woody Allen’s 1994
film Bullets Over Broadway is not the
most obvious choice in Allen’s oeuvre for musical adaptation. It’s an intellectual exploration of what it
means to be an artist and to be able to weigh art and love against one another,
and its very characters reject the panache and style that characterize Broadway
musicals. (If you were looking for the
most obvious choice, Bananas, Sleeper, and
Midnight in Paris wouldn’t be bad
starts, or, if you were feeling daring, What’s
Up, Tiger Lily?.) But it is the film
that he has chosen for his first musical, and, as with everything Mr. Allen
does, he has decided that if it absolutely has
to be done, it will be done brilliantly and with a heavy dose of nostalgia.
Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical, which is now in previews and opens April 10, is graced with a book by Mr.
Allen, inspired direction and choreography by that great hit-maker, Susan
Stroman, and a score made up of 1920s popular music, some more classically
popular than others, but all beautiful. (Glen Kelly
deserves a great deal of credit for his almost indistinguishable additional
lyrics, which help the songs fit into the plot.) The production of this show proves another
aspect of Mr. Allen’s pop-culture literacy, for the big-band orchestra, the
marvelous dance numbers, and the star turn performances recall the musicals of
Broadway’s Golden Age—as was clearly Mr. Allen’s intent.
The musical’s plot
hems almost exactly to that of the film: a struggling playwright, David Shayne,
is presented with the opportunity to produce his long-incubating play, with the
condition that a shrill, untalented mobster’s girlfriend be bestowed with a
role. Shayne, who abhors creative
compromise (an obviously autobiographical aspect to Mr. Allen’s writing here
rears its head), watches his control over the show slip away as it becomes
clear he is not half the artist he thought he was—though, as it turns out,
that’s okay. Here Shayne is portrayed
winningly by the endlessly talented Zach Braff, whose musical abilities I had
before only guessed at and whose comic abilities, I am glad to see, are still
wholly intact. Mr. Braff arguably plays
Woody Allen far more convincingly than John Cusack did in the film. Rather than Mr. Cusack’s mildly harried,
earnest egotist, Mr. Braff plays Shayne as a panicked, neurotic tempest of
agitation, which—unsurprisingly—he does without missing a beat.
Mr. Braff’s
performance is only the first of many (or all) in this production pulled off
perfectly and with unprecedented talent.
Brooks Ashmankas plays Warner Purcell, the male lead in Shayne’s play, a
hammy compulsive eater, with aplomb and incredible dancing skill for one so
burdened by a fat suit. Marin Mazzie, as
Helen Sinclair, Shayne’s female lead and muse, is about as good as it gets,
though never quite as scene-stealing as Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar for the
role. (Luckily, Sinclair’s “Don’t speak”
routine is intact, and neither over- nor underplayed.) Heléne York, as the spoiled girlfriend, Olive
Neal, is the show-stealer here, just exciting enough to receive ovations for
singing “I Want a Hot Dog For My Roll” and just irritating enough for the
audience to applaud, too, her eventual unfortunate fate. And Nick Cordero, as the mobster/ghostwriter
Cheech, can’t be counted out either.
He’s a dancer and singer of such impressive caliber that, in a way, he
is the glue that binds Bullets together. (A clever gimmick using “Up a Lazy River,”
featured in the film, as his character’s theme song, is intelligently
deployed.)
And it’s the songs,
more than anything, that make the show.
From a “Let’s Misbehave” duet between Neal and Purcell to the ridiculous
but somehow eminently perfect finale, Bullets
Over Broadway is a classic old-school Broadway musical, the kind that, but
for people like Mr. Allen, would have disappeared from the stage many a moon
ago.
Indeed, however, but for a few well-placed
one-liners (“Is it possible to love two women at once? Not if one finds out”) and the background
creative drive of the musical, the nebbishy, questioning undertone of Mr. Allen’s
films—which can actually be quite pleasant under the right circumstances—is mostly
absent here. (The touching finale of the
movie, from which stems the classic Allen line “There's two
things of which I'm certain. One is that
I love you. Two is that I'm not an
artist” has been replaced with a wonderfully fun musical number that’s actually
just as welcome, if not more.) But this isn’t
a criticism. Because repressing the
natural inclination to overwrite is what makes Bullets Over Broadway a great musical that will outlast not just
Mr. Allen but probably us all. So,
Woody, here’s to many more. We on
Broadway will be patiently waiting.
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