RAT-a-tat-tat!
That machine-gun fire you hear coming from the St. James Theatre is the sound of a hit.
“Bullets Over Broadway” has been in previews just three days, and already those in the know — that would be me! — are sensing it’s the show to beat this season.
The musical opens with a gangster walking out with a machine gun and shooting up the house.
At the first preview, the audience cheered and cheered — and didn’t stop until intermission.
My spies say director Susan Stroman has come up with some showstopping dances worthy of her last hit at the St. James, Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”
I’ve already written about “T’aint Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” which features a line of tap-dancing, gun-toting mobsters. It was the highlight of a “Bullets” press preview last month.
But audiences are also loving “(Up a) Lazy River,” which is where people go to get bumped off, the “Lazy River” being the Gowanus Canal.
Marin Mazzie, as Broadway diva Helen Sinclair, makes her first appearance singing a little known but catchy ditty from the ’20s called “They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me,” by Joe McCarthy and Fred Fisher.
William Ivey Long has costumed her, appropriately, in faded but high diva couture.
Long’s costumes, I’m told, are as witty as ever, especially in the opening number, “Tiger Rag.” It’s set in a club owned by one of the gangsters, and the showgirls are fitted with swishing tiger tails.
Musical theater buffs will note that the tails are an homage to Long’s mentor, the great costume designer Willa Kim, who pinned cow tails on the chorus girls in Tommy Tune’s 1991 musical, “The Will Rogers Follies.”
Kim was vilified back then by the insufferable Broadway division of the feminist police, who thought her costumes were, in the popular phrase of the day, “demeaning to women.”
Fortunately, we’ve regained our sense of cheeky fun, and audiences are laughing it up at Long’s tip of the tail to her.
Newcomer Heléne Yorke, as the ditzy would-be actress Olive Neal, is being pegged as a Tony nominee. Her big number, “The Hot Dog Song” (“I need a hot dog for my bun”), is a comic highlight.
And keep your eye on Nick Cordero as Cheech, the gangster-turned-dramaturge whom Chazz Palminteri played in the film.
“He’s stealing every scene he’s in,” a source says.
Don’t look for all your favorite bits and gags from the movie. Woody Allen has come up with plenty of fresh scenes and jokes for the musical. Gone is the most famous exchange in the movie:
“Two martinis, please. Very dry.”
“How’d you know what I drank?”
“Oh, you want one, too? Three.”
It’s been replaced by . . . well, I’m not going to give away a good Woody Allen gag.
“Bullets” is running long, but Stroman told the producers after Wednesday night’s performance that she knows exactly where to cut.
Allen’s been at every performance and has his scissors at the ready, too.
He is, in the theater, the opposite of Brooks. During previews for “The Producers,” Brooks stood in the aisle during intermission, soaking up the praise and personally greeting everybody in the house.
Allen slips into his seat when the lights go down, and races up the aisle before they come up.
As for the ongoing Dylan Farrow controversy, it doesn’t seem to be having any effect on the audience’s enjoyment of “Bullets.”
By 8:30 on the morning after Tuesday’s first preview, the line for rush tickets stretched from the St. James to the corner of 44th Street and Eighth Avenue.