'Bullets over Broadway: The Musical'

Bullets over Broadway: The Musical, written by Allen and based on the film he wrote with Douglas McGrath, has both. It also has a lot of old songs, and while some are sing-along familiar, many of them are recognizable as period pieces but otherwise forgettable.

That’s not to say that Bullets is not fun. It is. It’s just something that shouldn’t be looked at too deeply because then I run into my own set of moral arguments. So let’s start with the fun.

David Shayne (Michael Williams), a struggling playwright, is offered money to produce his play on Broadway. The only catch — he has to cast Olive Neal (Jemma Jane), the girlfriend of mob boss Nick Valenti (Michael Corvino), in the play. He eventually agrees as long as he can have Helen Sinclair (Emma Stratton), “a drunk and an adulteress,” as his lead, and the food-addicted Warner Purcell (Bradley Allan Zarr) as her costar.

Olive has a voice that could shatter stainless steel (making me hope Jane, who portrays her, has a good voice coach) and comes with a bodyguard, Cheech (Jeff Brooks), a tap-dancing, cold-blooded killer who knows how to write dialogue and characters like a pro. Shayne sells his soul to the devil, or rather the thug, to have a hit, and then finds that what he really wants to do is retreat to Pittsburgh and live a normal life. (Places in Pennsylvania are always good for a laugh.)

What’s with Mr. Woofles?

Each of the performers has a moment that wows us — Stratton belts out “I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle,” and Jane is hilarious in “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll” — but I kept hoping Cheech would come along and do some work on the script. The most memorable character, Eden Brent (Rachel Bahler), and her dog, Mr. Woofles, have no real reason for being in the story, but they are fun to watch. While the nostalgic songs are pleasant, they are forced to fit in where they don’t belong and make me wish that Allen had stuck to his original plan to have music written for the play.

The philosophical arguments that Allen constructs are worth considering, although not while watching the show. If there was a fire and you could save one thing, would it be a work of art or a human life? The play seems to come down on the side of saving the artwork. Do you fall in love with the artist or the person? Most of the characters, it seems, settle for the artist over the person, even if they know it’s wrong. (And perhaps it’s a way of asking us to separate Allen the artist from Allen the man.) Even Shayne would rather be the fake artist than the real person, who is seen as a total mediocrity.

And everyone cheats. The writer cheats on his girlfriend, Ellen (Hannah Rose DeFlumeri) and claims credit for work he didn’t write. His girlfriend cheats on him. Olive cheats on Valenti, her protector, with costar Purcell, who cheats on his diet. Helen lacks any morality, using alcohol to avoid her pain and sex to get what she wants, so she could be said to be cheating on herself.

Novelty songs and sexual innuendo

Contrast this with High Society, which just closed at the Walnut Street Theatre. Both are based on movies, and both use music written for other purposes. High Society deals with the upper-crust, Bullets with the lower classes. The first uses music by Cole Porter, the latter from a variety of novelty songs and old standards. High Society uses wit and style; Bullets gets down and dirty with sexual innuendo and lots of lewdness. Both use humor and music to deal with hard choices in life, and, in the case of Bullets, the playwright even tries to make murder into something we can laugh at.

But perhaps it’s that callous disregard for human life that doesn’t allow any of the characters to emerge as full-fledged human beings. So go ahead, laugh and enjoy yourself. Just don’t ask too many hard questions.