Our musical options are deadly serious right now, from bloody barricades to forbidden love and heavy life choices. So thank God for “Bullets Over Broadway,” a giddy feast of silly flash amid the woe-is-me dreariness.
Woody Allen’s adaptation of his 1994 movie checks all the boxes: zingers and puns, slapstick and visual gags, leggy showgirls and tap-dancing chorus boys, hammy stars and lavish set pieces.
This is defiantly old-fashioned entertainment, and boy does it hit the spot!
Allen’s films haven’t been funny in a while, and his last Broadway effort was a wretched entry in the 2011 anthology “Relatively Speaking.” Yet this new show’s often uproarious — maybe he was inspired by collaborator Susan Stroman, the choreographer and director of the similarly minded “The Producers.”
“Bullets” has transferred effortlessly to the stage — but then, it should, since it takes place on 1929 Broadway. The score is made up of vintage nuggets (sometimes with lyrics tweaked to fit the plot). Aside from “Let’s Misbehave,” “ ’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” and “Up a Lazy River,” most of them are pretty obscure.
Zach Braff (TV’s “Scrubs”) makes his musical debut as David Shayne, a pretentious playwright who blames artistic compromises for his lack of success.
But when mob kingpin Nick Valenti (Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore) becomes his new play’s lead backer, David quickly learns to be accommodating — starting with the casting of Valenti’s girlfriend, Olive Neal (Heléne Yorke, in a comic tour de force), a dimwit with a hideous, braying voice.
Most of the show takes place backstage as David’s play painfully plods through rehearsal and a Boston tryout. Along the way, he gets unexpectedly brilliant rewriting tips from Valenti’s laconic henchman, Cheech (Nick Cordero).
Stroman packs the first act with show-stoppers, including a mobster-tap extravaganza and girl conductors dancing on top of a train car — the stylish set and costumes are by Santo Loquasto and William Ivey Long, respectively.
The pace flags in Act II, but the excellent cast goes at the material ravenously throughout, especially Marin Mazzie as boozy has-been star Helen Sinclair, who flirts with David (“Don’t speak!”) just so he’ll boost her role in the play. Second banana extraordinaire Brooks Ashmanskas also shines as Warner Purcell, a gluttonous ham always raiding craft service.
“Bullets” doesn’t pretend to reinvent the musical, but it does what it does with a superb sense of craft and great gusto.
Even the racy jokes are more ditzy than vulgar, climaxing, so to speak, in the 1927 ditty “A Hot Dog for My Roll”: “Give me a big one,” Olive sings. “That’s what I said/I want it so it will fill my bread.”
As she explains to David: “If you meet me later, I’ll explain the double entendres. It’s French — I think it means intercourse.”
While she says this, guys in hot-dog costumes are parading around the stage. “Bullets Over Broadway” is packed with this kind of yummy nonsense — and delivers it with relish.