The Chanteuse and the Gun Are Loaded
6 / 10
Some things were never meant to be shouted through megaphones. On the basis of 'Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical,' the occasionally funny but mostly just loud new show that opened at the St. James Theater on Thursday night, that would include the wit of Woody Allen...Yet while the movie was a helium-light charmer, this all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing reincarnation is also all but charm-free...What registered as wistfully absurd on screen has been pushed into grotesqueness. Sex talk that came across with a shrug and a glint resurfaces as a broad neon leer. And the moral ambivalence of its central character feels inappropriately queasy in this heightened, brightened context...Characters who were deftly drawn cartoons on screen have been turned into gargoyles by a desperately hard-working cast.
