A playwright who needs someone to back his next show. A mobster who needs some way to please his showgirl girlfriend.
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship - or a brand new musical comedy!
Based on the screenplay of the acclaimed film, Bullets Over Broadway brings the talents of Woody Allen and Susan Stroman together for the first time.
Loaded with big laughs, colorful characters, and the songs that made the 20s roar, Bullets Over Broadway is ready to bring musical comedy back with a bang.
Allen has pulled something of a Sylvester Stallone in his Broadway book-writer debut: His book never really abandons his screenplay sufficiently to reinvent itself for the theater. For most of the evening, some great dance numbers and many old tunes have simply be inserted into this tale of a young writer (Zach Braff) who willingly allows a mobster (Nick Cordero) to rewrite his play, much to the play's improvement...'Bullets,' the musical, is loaded down with old ditties that wore out their welcome sometime during the run of 'Arthur Godfrey Time' and only vaguely refer to Allen's story...'Bullets' on Broadway rarely breaks free of the movie, and fond memories keep taking us back to the original.
The cardinal sin in adapting a Woody Allen film comedy for the stage is forcing the funny. So the creators of 'Bullets Over Broadway the Musical,' the sledgehammering act of period-tune-driven desperation that opened Thursday night at the St. James Theatre, have a whole lot to answer for. The sinners include Allen himself... and Susan Stroman, the Tony-winning director-choreographer ('The Producers') who amps up the material in uncomfortably vulgar fashion. (Yard-long phallus, anyone, for 'The Hot Dog Song?') Except for the heretofore unheralded Nick Cordero, who plays Cheech, the goodfella with the soul of Euripides, no one emerges with a feather in their fedora. Not the hard-working Zach Braff, mugging his way through the ill-fitting role of handwringing nebbish; not the cartoonish Helene Yorke, overplaying the stock-variety floozy; not even the musical veteran Marin Mazzie, in a scenery-chewing turn as an operatically needy stage diva...
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