A medium-calibre musical comedy with a substantial body count, Bullets Over Broadway begins with a spray of machine-gun fire and ends two and a half hours later with an absurd ode to bananas. The scenes in between feature girls, guys, guns, gams, a satire of modernist drama, and further phallic symbols. To transform Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath's screenplay into a musical, director Susan Stroman has added American songbook standards like Let's Misbehave and Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You.
The plot concerns David Shayne (Zach Braff from Scrubs), a pompous young playwright with a sub-O'Neill drama. Mobster Nick Valenti (The Sopranos' Vincent Pastore) agrees to front the money for a Broadway run on the condition that Shayne finds a role for his showgirl moll Olive Neal (Heléne Yorke of Masters of Sex), a blockhead blonde with theatrical ambitions. "I want to play Lady Macbeth like I did in Union City. And this time not in pasties," she whines.
When rehearsals commence, so do complications. David find himself drawn to leading lady Helen Sinclair (Marin Mazzie); leading man Warner Purcell (Brooks Ashmanskas) finds himself drawn to the buffet table; Olive approaches new heights of histrionic ignominy; and no one can make any sense of David's pretentious script. "You don't write like people talk," complains Cheech (Nick Cordero), Olive's bodyguard and a budding dramaturg. In secret, Cheech rewrites the dialogue, ostensibly providing grittier material (though the excerpts we see are still pretty dire).
Cordero is the play's find – he's a genuine triple threat. The TV and film stars are in generally better voice than expected, and the musical theatre pros (Mazzie, Ashmanskas, Karen Ziemba) prevail, though their turns are somewhat self-congratulatory.
The show comes across as rather frightened of female sexuality, embodied by Olive's terrorizing eroticism. The eternally boyish Braff, meanwhile, has little chemistry with either Mazzie or Betsy Wolfe as his sweet ceramicist girlfriend.
Stroman's strength is storytelling via choreography, and that's often the case here, particularly Ashmanskas's lumbering jetés and Yorke's brassy thrusts. The songs are less successfully integrated and rarely deepen or enhance the narrative and emotional arcs. The closing strains of Yes, We Have No Bananas is a particularly baffling choice.
Still, the chorus girls charm in numbers set in a Harlem nightclub. And the tap routine from the chorus boys? Pretty terrific, too. While little of the lightweight show will endure, I expect to retain happy memories of Cheech trilling Up a Lazy River as he goes to dump yet another body in Brooklyn's Gowanus canal.
• How Woody Allen's personal-life dramas fed into the story
