Theatre in Review: Bullets Over Broadway (St. James Theatre)

	Caption: Zach Braff, Marin Mazzie. Photo: Paul Kolnik.

In Bullets Over Broadway, Woody Allen and Susan Stroman have conspired to produce the big, splashy, stylish old-school musical that every season needs. By and large, they have succeeded, with one proviso: This is musical comedy that lacks a distinctive musical voice.

Like the film on which it is based, Bullets Over Broadway is a backstage farce set in 1929, and everyone involved has set out to make an evening of high-style fun. Stroman, in collaboration with scenic designer Santo Loquasto and costume designer William Ivey Long, has stuffed the proceedings with chorus cuties dressed as tigers when they're not scantily clad in mink bikinis. There's a line of girls in Grand Central Station, tap dancing on top of a railroad train as if they are driving the engine. The apartment of a grand dame actress features an entrance hallway that looks suspiciously like the Temple of Dendur. An entire Broadway stage, complete with human caryatids in the proscenium, spins wildly as an opening night descends into chaos.

This being a Woody Allen show, a cast of expert comics is assured. Heléne Yorke is hard to resist as Olive, the brainless, blonde, brass-voiced chorine who, thanks to her gangster lover, gets cast as a psychiatrist in a gloomy Broadway drama. Demonstrating her skills to the beleaguered playwright, she crawls around the floor, pumping her pelvis in what she calls an interpretive dance -- adding that the Catholic Church had a different interpretation. (The number is called "The Hot Dog Song," and if you don't think she is joined by a quartet of guys in hot dog suits, then you haven't seen a Susan Stroman show.) Even Olive is skeptical about her chances as a dramatic actress: "The only way you're going to see my name in lights is if I change it to 'Exit,'" she says.

Brooks Ashmanskas is a delight as an increasingly corpulent leading man, torn between Olive and the nearest buffet. (In one especially mortifying moment, he reaches into his pocket to proffer a rose, producing a chicken leg instead.) The two of them flirt amusingly to "Let's Misbehave," bouncing around on a series of chairs that have the resiliency of trampolines. Add in Marin Mazzie as a man-eating leading lady ("Even when I played the Virgin Mary, I refused to play her as a virgin.") and Karen Ziemba as a dotty character woman, excessively devoted to Mr. Woofles, her pet dog, and an evening of fun is all but guaranteed.

But Bullets Over Broadway is so self-assured that it's hard not to notice that the score, a collection of '20s-era pop and jazz tunes, often seems incidental to the action. There's genuine black humor in the use of "Up a Lazy River" each time a gangster drags his latest victim to Brooklyn to be dumped into the Gowanus Canal, and the peppy "Runnin' Wild" helps pace everyone's frantic preparations to take the play out of town. Then again, Mazzie's first number, the bouncy "They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me" hardly seems like the expression of a diva in love with her own importance. (I won't be the only show fan for whom that song is indelibly associated with George S. Irving on the Irene cast album, but I digress. ) And I'm still scratching my head, trying to figure out why the show ends with a rendition of "Yes, We Have No Bananas." In more than a few cases, the lyrics have been so extensively rewritten, by Glen Kelly, who is also credited with music adaptation, that you have to wonder why Allen and company didn't simply commission a score.

The lack of original music and lyrics is most damaging to Zach Braff, as David, the young playwright, and Betsy Wolfe, as the nice girl who has stood by him through thin and thin. As in the film, David is horrified to discover that Cheech, the hired gun who keeps tabs on Olive, is the far better writer, first offering helpful suggestions and then rewriting the script wholesale. Any team of musical theatre people would make David's story the spine of the show, giving him an "I want" number, then a song laying out his moral dilemma with Cheech, and probably a number in which he decides he's happier in Pittsburgh, from whence he came. But the songs in Bullets Over Broadway aren't specific enough to fill out the characters; Allen seems content to leave them as a collection of two-dimensional types. This is fine enough with the broadly cartooned folk played by Yorke, Mazzie, Ziemba, et al., but it leaves Braff and Wolfe, both skilled, ingratiating performers, with thoroughly colorless roles; the progress of their relationship hardly matters at all. It's also telling that when two of the most likable characters are killed off in Act II, we are apparently expected to feel nothing; this is show that wants to make you laugh without offering anything like emotional engagement.

This unwillingness to fill out the characters is perhaps connected to a slight uncertainty of tone in the second act. Yes, Bullets Over Broadway is a farce, delivered in the style of '30s screwball comedies, but it is hard to accept that the play would get good reviews out of town, given Olive's inept, screechy performance. And when the New York opening night is interrupted by an on-stage gun battle, and still the play is a hit, we've entered the realm of sloppy playwriting.

Still, Nick Cordero makes a smashing impression as Cheech, the gangster with dramaturgical gifts, especially when he is leading a chorus of his criminal colleagues in "T'aint Nobody's Business If I Do," and there are solid turns by Vincent Pastore as a love-struck mobster and Lenny Wolpe as an eager-to-please producer. Loquasto always has another visual surprise up his sleeve, and Long's costumes, from art deco evening gowns to Technicolor flapper dresses to snazzy, boxy three-piece suits, are just about perfect. Donald Holder's lighting adds sparkle to every scene, and Peter Hylenski's sound design is remarkably transparent for a big musical; he also provides a full complement of effects, including machine guns, subways, and police sirens.

And Bullets Over Broadway certainly fills a gap in the season's offerings, providing the big, uncomplicated evening of fun that should keep the St. James filled for some time. And if I still wish it had a score that illuminated the characters, raised the dramatic stakes, and helped advance the plot? Well, t'aint nobody's bizness if I do. --David Barbour