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.
It's too bad that the comedy about a playwriting hit man is a bit of a miss. On the plus side, director and choreographer Susan Stroman's dance numbers pack sure-footed pizzazz. And the good-looking production depicts 1929 New York with wit and grace notes...But working in tandem with Allen, who adapted the screenplay of his Oscar-winning 1994 comedy while dealing with anything-but-amusing personal issues, Stroman doesn't match the zany, out-of-this-world wow factor of her collaboration with Mel Brooks on 'The Producers'...Allen's showbiz and gangland eccentrics stiffen into cardboard when they're amplified from two to three dimensions. A sense of nuance and ahumanity goes missing. It doesn't help that key actors shoot blanks, including Zach Braff, of 'Scrubs' fme, and Helene Yorke, of 'Masters of Sex.' Both need infusions of charm for their roles as a morally iffy writer and the tootsie ruining his play.
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