[Dixielandjazz] Lady Day..., Bullets Over Broadway reviewed - by Rex Reed

[Robert Ringwald]

The Return of the Jazz Age
Billie Holiday bio-drama and Woody Allen remake bring old-fashioned song and dance
to Broadway
by Rex Reed
New York Observer, April 16, 2014
Fabulous! That's a once-respectable word that has been sadly relegated, through exhaustion
and misuse, to the gallows of the lexicon. It's so insincere now that you don't hear
it much anymore beyond the floor shows of Vegas, but if the shoe fits...
For Audra McDonald, who is channeling a fitful night in the life and music of the
famously tortured Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill on Broadway,
the shoe fits better than a proverbial glove. It's not only a consummate performance
of skill and craft that borders on the supernatural; it's the performance of the
year. I admit I was skeptical. While I've seen the amazing soprano miscast (110 in
the Shade) and wasted (in an unbilled "guest" shot as the demented bag woman in the
recent concert version of Sweeney Todd at Lincoln Center), I have never seen or heard
her give less than 100 percent onstage. She doesn't look like Lady Day (too curvy
and much too healthy to be a heroin-addicted drunk), and she certainly doesn't sound
like one of the most uniquely swinging voices in the history of jazz. But she's done
her research like an architect digging up a pharaoh's tomb, lowered her keys and
poured herself into a skintight white gown with a trademark gardenia in her hair,
acting out the booze and smack, the voice wobbly in the vowels, then stretching out
the long notes on the end of phrases until the transformation is astounding. She
leaves you shaking.
It's when she stops singing and starts talking in a gauzy haze about the New York
drug busts that landed her in prison and prevented her from working in New York clubs
that the show stumbles. The scene is a midnight in 1959, the setting a seedy joint
in Philly, and the star is at the end of her rope -- four months before she died
of cirrhosis and heart failure and God only knows what else, brought on by years
of self-abuse. These were the days when the quality of her beat-up voice had its
most special appeal for me. And Ms. McDonald captures every heartbeat of the music
on such legendary treasures as "Strange Fruit," "God Bless the Child" and "Don't
Explain." Between songs -- and sometimes in the middle, too -- she sketches in some
details, stopping and starting when her moods shift. Be forewarned: it's not a great
play Lanie Robertson has written, and Lonny Price's direction seems merely perfunctory.
The Circle in the Square has been transformed into a cabaret for the occasion. Drinks
are served to ringsiders. But as the evening mist moves in, you share an experience
you will never forget.
If you've read much about Lady Day or seen the movie melodrama Lady Sings the Blues
with Diana Ross, you won't discover anything you didn't know going in. She talks
about her need for love, children, a home, the normal things in life that never happened
-- but Billie was never normal. A 200-pound child who learned to sing listening to
Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records while scrubbing floors in a Baltimore cathouse,
she was doomed from the start. She touches on the racial humiliations she endured
while traveling on a bus with Artie Shaw's all-white band and the pain that led to
heroin and alcoholism. If only the writer had added a few more minutes for Lady to
reflect on the impact of what she actually learned from the sordid details of her
life. Then you'd have a real play instead of a pile of cliches. But you won't have
much time to worry about what is missing. You'll be too busy being electrified. Like
the lyrics in the haunting "Deep Song" she sings at the end, "the blues crawled through
the door and licked her heart once more." Audra McDonald lives and sings it all,
conjuring the need for adjectives like mesmerizing, captivating, galvanizing...
And, yes, fabulous!



Sometimes it's O.K. to go to the theater and just let go, have a good time, and stop
worrying if there's something you don't understand in the latest pretentious import
from London that nobody gets except Ben Brantley. That's exactly what awaits you
at Susan Stroman's dazzling Broadway musical version of Woody Allen's 1994 Jazz Age
movie Bullets Over Broadway. If you don't love the pure, passionate entertainment
value of this bauble of Roaring '20s madness and mayhem, you need to have your marbles
counted.
>From the mug with the machine gun who swaggers onstage before the curtain and blows
the title into the scrim in electric lights to the best gum-chewing chorus line since
Miss Adelaide and her Hot Box Girls in Guys and Dolls, it's pure fudge, and only
an old crank with irritable bowel syndrome could go home grousing. This is the one
about the struggling Greenwich Village playwright (a wonderful Zach Braff doing a
solid riff on Woody) who sells out fast when his first Broadway show is financed
by gangsters. It's a Prohibition farce about mobsters and molls, theatrical divas
and hilarious Times Square buffoons that mixes the hammy theatrics of overwrought
thespians ready to die for their art with the antics of rats and hoods who don't
mind killing them for it. The theater makes strange bedfellows, which an intense,
dedicated and neurotically insecure young writer named David Shayne (Mr. Braff) discovers
to his horror when it becomes clear that the backing for his new play is coming from
a grizzled mobster named Nick (Vincent Pastore) on the condition that it must star
his brainless girlfriend, Olive (an outstanding Helene Yorke, the funniest honk-voiced
blonde tomato since Jean Hagen in Singin' in the Rain). After eight months at Nick's
speakeasy and still in the chorus line of flappers called The Atta-Girls, her only
experience at acting is playing Lady Macbeth in Jersey in pasties, but she's soon
wrecking David's play while her bodyguard, a goon named Cheech (marvelously sung
and danced by a scene-stealing Nick Cordero), is rewriting the dialogue.
To make things worse (and drop-dead funnier), the cast includes a vampish, over-the-hill
dipsomaniac who drinks paint remover with a twist and thinks she's Tallulah Bankhead
and Kit Cornell rolled into the body of Hedy Lamarr (deliciously played with all
bases loaded by Marin Mazzie). There's also an overweight leading man (Brooks Ashmanskas),
who turns from a paunchy matinee idol into Fatty Arbuckle before anybody gets close
to an opening night. There's nothing anyone can do to replace the talentless Olive
without ending up in the Hudson River, but as her bodyguard gets bitten by the smell
of greasepaint himself, hearing his lines mutilated, he's not beyond a St. Valentine's
Day massacre of his own to preserve his sacred dialogue for the archives. And before
it's over the surprises fly like Uzi fire. ("You killed Olive!" "You've seen her
acting -- it was a mercy killing!") To everyone's shock, Cheech's rewrites turn the
play from tedious, tepid and intellectual to a hot and horny hit. It's corny, but
for once the corn is ripe and ready for picking.
Eschewing a new score, which nobody knows how to write anymore anyway, Woody Allen
and director-choreographer Stroman have amassed a file of period standards ("I'm
Sitting on Top of the World," "Runnin' Wild," "Up a Lazy River," and Cole Porter's
"Let's Misbehave," to name but a few), and Ms. Stroman has staged the whole thing
like a spoof of Mickey Spillane, replete with dancing hot dogs and a stage full of
robust, tap-dancing mobsters bringing the golden oldie "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If
I Do" to a standing ovation. Santo Loquasto's revolving stage -- showing points of
view from backstage, onstage and the audience -- joins his speakeasies and gold-digger
penthouses with a visual flair that exudes an homage to old New York the way Damon
Runyon envisioned it. The deeper points Woody Allen makes about fame, compromise
and success are worth perusal, but the critics who always knock themselves cockeyed
searching for hidden meanings in his work are really grasping for straws when they
compare Bullets Over Broadway to Chekhov. Sharp, energetic, colorful and stylish,
this is an intelligent, high-stomping romp and nothing more, but it pays off in spades
and you'd be crazy to miss it.
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

First you forget names,
then you forget faces.
Then you forget to pull up your zipper...
it's worse when you forget to pull it down.