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.
In an ideal universe, the new musical 'Bullets Over Broadway,' based on the 1994 Woody Allen film, would shut down for a few months so that a talented songwriter - perhaps David Yazbek ('Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' or the young team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul ('A Christmas Story') - could pen an original score for it. To its credit, 'Bullets Over Broadway' is mildly entertaining...Although the show contains flashy design elements, amusing one-liners and generally decent performances, the decision to use jazz standards from the 1920s and 1930s instead of an original, well-integrated score proves to be absolutely fatal. By pigeonholing these familiar tunes into the existing plot, they arrive randomly and have almost nothing to do with the characters or plot...Zach Braff works too hard at portraying the stressed-out playwright. His singing voice is pretty thin as well. On the other hand, Marin Mazzie is ideally cast as the grandly theatrical Sinclair, and Vincent Pastore of 'The Sopranos' is effortlessly effective as Valenti.
Pastore is exceedingly funny, as is the delicious Marin Mazzie, who blows her way deliciously and fearlessly through the Dianne Wiest role in the film... Brooks Ashmanskas eats his way through the night as the gourmand-actor Warner Purcell, and Nick Cordero stays sandpaper dry, perhaps to a fault, as Cheech... And Lenny Wolpe holds down the normative character, the agent Julian Marx, whose job is to set up the funny lines of the wackos and keep the narrative moving. There are, for sure, times when 'Bullets' is stymied by its lack of an original score, although the lyrics have been thoroughly subjugated to its comedic purpose, wittily so. The use of standards was not such a problem on film, since part of Allen's cinematic gestalt was to forge a gauzy comic tribute to a golden age of Broadway. But when you translate Allen and Douglas McGrath's backstage comedy to the Main Stem, somehow the Great American Songbook starts to feel a bit like a cop-out.
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