BULLETS OVER BROADWAY the Musical Gears Up for March Opening

The show doesn't open in previews till March 11, but the box office has been open since November for Bullets Over Broadway, the Broadway musical version of Woody Allen's 1994 comedy film about a writer trying to get his show up and running on the Great White Way of 1929 while sidestepping interference from a mobster with money and the bimbo girlfriend he wants to set up in a starring role.

Allen and Douglas McGrath wrote the script for the movie, which brings to mind backstage musicals like 42nd Street and backstage plays like Broadway. The first has a producer and some plucky kids coping with all sorts of strife and complications trying to put on a show, while the latter mixes in the gangster element. Allen has adapted the screenplay from the film to create the book of this new Bullets, and, yes, it will be a musical, although the score will be taken from period songs arranged and adapted by Glen Kelly. Five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman is directing and choreographing, with three-time Tony winner Santo Loquasto as scenic designer and six-time Tony winner William Ivey Long as costume designer. Loquasto also did production direction for the movie.

But I'm sure you're wondering who's going to play whom. So here's a handy chart of the characters and actors:

David Shayne, the writer trying to keep together the pieces of his play.
Film: John Cusack
Stage: Zach Braff of Scrubs fame.

Dianne Wiest and John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway

Helen Sinclair, the boozy drama queen of a leading lady who keeps saying "Don't speak" and trying to seduce David.
Film: Dianne Wiest
Stage: Marin Mazzie
Note: The role won Wiest an Oscar in the Supporting Actress category along with a slew of other awards.

Cheech, a hitman and bodyguard who starts to play an important role in the creative side of the show.
Film: Chazz Palminteri
Stage: Nick Cordero
Note: Palminteri was also nominated for an Oscar.

Olive Neal, the gangster's moll who isn't the brightest bulb but wiggles her way into David's show, anyway.
Film: Jennifer Tilly
Stage: Heléne Yorke
Note: Yup. Tilly was Oscar-nominated, too.

Joe Viterelli

Nick Valenti, the gangster/money man pulling the strings and pushing his girlfriend onto Broadway.
Film: Joe Viterelli
Broadway: Vincent Pastore
Note: Italian-American Viterelli and Italian-American Pastore share what Hollywood considers a stereotypical mobster look. You will remember Pastore as Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero in The Sopranos.


Julian Marx, the producer trying to keep the show afloat.
Film: Jack Warden
Stage: Lenny Wolpe
Note: The name Julian Marx is a callback to Julian Marsh, the director on the verge of a heart attack in 42nd Street. And maybe to the Marx Brothers.

Warner Purcell, the leading man in David's play who eats too much and has a bad habit of putting the moves on Olive.
Film: Jim Broadbent
Stage: Brooks Ashmanskas

Karen Ziemba

Eden Brent, the chirpy, perky actress who is never dressed without a smile. And a chihuahua.
Film: Tracy Ullman
Stage: Karen Ziemba
Note: I saw Ziemba in Crazy For You three times. Susan Stroman also choreographed that take-off on a classic Gershwin musical from 1930. And she won a Tony for it.

Ellen, David's sweet girlfriend who gets ignored once his affair with Broadway show biz begins.
Film: Mary Louise Parker
Stage: Betsy Wolfe

The characters and inside Broadway plot sound perfect for a musical, and that cast is first-rate. I have some concerns about Braff -- never heard him sing -- but you can see him and everybody else but Ziemba in a Playbill video done of the cast's photo shoot back at the beginning of January. That's Ashmanskas reaching for a pastry, Mazzie tipping back the flask and Yorke looking snazzy in red.

You'll find the complete cast for this new Bullets along with info on the plot and how to buy tickets at the official Bullets Over Broadway the Musical website. Previews begin March 11 at the St. James Theatre, with opening night set for April 10. If you can't time-travel back to the real Broadway in 1929, Bullets Over Broadway looks like a nifty substitute.

Woody Allen's "Rome" Is Fun, If Not Quite "Paris"

It seems like forever since Woody Allen has taken on the Woody Allen role in one of his movies. Instead, Owen Wilson, Anthony Hopkins and Larry David have played the patented Woody role -- intellectual, neurotic, curmudgeonly -- most recently, while Woody hasn't, since 2006, anyway, when he played a magician in "Scoop" in a role that wasn't all that central to the plot.

It's almost surprising to see him back on the screen in "To Rome with Love," back being the fussy, fidgety, idiosyncratic guy we remember all the way back to "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run." This time, he's Jerry, a retired opera director who's always gotten slammed for his outrageous staging choices such as "Rigoletto" with everybody dressed as white mice and a whole "Tosca" inside a phone booth. Jerry and  his wife, an edgy psychiatrist named Phyllis (Judy Davis), have come to Rome to meet their daughter's new Italian fiance, one Michelangelo, whose dad, otherwise a mortician, loves to sing opera in the shower. Jerry becomes somewhat obsessed with getting the singing mortician (played by tenor Fabio Armiliato) onto the stage in "Pagliacci," even if he has to put a rolling shower center stage and keep his leading man naked, wet and soapy to be able to perform.

That opera/shower plotline is one of four in "To Rome with Love," so it's not like Woody gave himself the leading role in the film. Instead, he has a light, frothy (perhaps bubbly is a better word) story, played completely for laughs, that serves him and the movie well, reminding us of the days when he was such a charming on-screen presence. Davis is just right as his comic foil, and Alison Pill is lovely as their daughter, even if it seems unlikely she could've come from that gene pool.

"To Rome with Love" focuses on the fantasy aspects of its central city, with Roberto Benigni also in a fanciful plot thread about a man who suddenly and inexplicably becomes a celebrity, swarmed by paparazzi, pursued by beautiful women, chauffeured and pampered and treated like royalty. It makes no sense, of course, but it works just fine as a commentary on fame, as slight as it (and Benigni) are.

The Benigni piece and the third plotline, about a young, naive couple of newlyweds from the country who fall into romantic hijinks with strangers, are offered in Italian with some subtitles, so don't be surprised if you can speak a few words by the time you get home. "Bella," "Ecco" and "Non lo so" were popping up all over the place. My husband also noticed that boxer shorts is "boxer" since Benigni's character gets asked the boxers or briefs question during his flirtation with fame.

That third story, about the wide-eyed small-town kids trying to navigate the big city, was my least favorite of the four, with its hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (Penelope Cruz) trope not working for me at all. Anna, the call girl, pretends to be the boy's wife when she mistakenly shows up in his hotel room in her skin-tight red dress and stilettos just as his stodgy Roman relatives arrive to meet him. For one thing, Woody needs to give up o the hookers already. Plus it seems strange that the innocent boy gets hottie Penelope Cruz for his sexual adventure, while the girl has to make do with a bald, chubby guy who looks a bit like the Italian version of George Costanza. Even without that disconnect, the tone of it is all too obvious and farcical for me. As well as kind of unpleasant.

It's the fourth story that comes off the the deepest and most interesting, mostly because of Alec Baldwin, who gives his mysterious character, an architect who is remembering the time he spent in Rome as a youth, a softness and contemplative quality that set him apart. He tries to steer Jesse Eisenberg, a younger version of him, away from a stupid but inevitable hook-up with his girlfriend's exotic friend, an actress with a spiky, narcissistic sexual energy. Eisenberg comes close to Woody Allen's young persona, with his intellectual pretensions and befuddled romantic yearnings, even though Baldwin's character is older and wiser in ways Allen never seemed to reach as an actor. It's all very intriguing, with good performances from Baldwin, Eisenberg, and Greta Gerwig as the girlfriend who gets lost in the shuffle. I wasn't as happy with Ellen Page as Monica, the irresistible object of desire. Page is too whiny, too nasal, and not really all that interesting. Maybe Penelope Cruz should've tried this role, with the stereotypical call girl role excised from the movie altogether.

"To Rome with Love" has one more showing at the Normal Theater, tonight at 7 pm. It's a bargain at $6, plus soda and popcorn are only a dollar each.

So, no, I didn't love it as much as I loved "Midnight in Paris" and its intoxicating romanticism. This one steers closer to broad comedy, which is not as close to my heart. But that's okay, Woody. This one is a solid B and worth its 112 minutes in the theater. And, after all, we'll always have "Paris."

The Perfect Match: "Purple Rose of Cairo" and the Big Screen

Any movie that begins and ends with Fred Astaire singing is likely to be a hit with me. "The Purple Rose of Cairo," Woody Allen's 1985 ode to the power of movies, does begin and end with Fred, but it has a lot more to recommend it than just that.

Like this year's Oscar contenders "The Artist" and "Hugo," "The Purple Rose of Cairo" looks at the fantasy world of the movies and how it overlaps, sometimes awkwardly, with real life, as well as what it means to sit in an audience in the dark and fall in love with what's on screen.
Because they're about the fantasy, none of those three really hangs it hat on reality, but there are some very real, poignant moments in "The Purple Rose of Cairo." It's also the only one that departs from the more traditional Hollywood Happy Ending. When questioned about that ending, Allen has supposedly said the one he used in the film is the happy ending, and I can see that. If his point is that we lose our troubles and find a measure of happiness at the movies, the fact that Mia Farrow's Cecelia (fun fact: that name, from the Latin, means "blind") is back in her seat at the end, once again safely watching the big screen, is a happy ending of sorts.

Farrow's Cecelia is a small-town waitress during the Depression when the movie begins, a not-very-good waitress who drops dishes a lot and pays more attention to the love lives of her favorite screen stars than to the customers. Every chance she gets, she goes to the local movie show, looking for glamor, sophistication, romance and escape. Gil Shepherd, played by the perfectly clean-cut, boyishly handsome Jeff Daniels, appears as a supporting player in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the new movie Cecelia goes to see. Gil is playing the role of Tom Baxter, a Michigan boy in a pith helmet who explores foreign ports, experiences the high life in New York, and falls in love with a swanky nightclub chanteuse. But after Cecelia sits through one showing after another of "Purple Rose," a strange thing happens. Tom Baxter looks right at her, talks to her, and walks off the screen to be with her. Tom Baxter. Not Gil Shepherd, the actor. Tom Baxter, the character in the movie.

Once he's jumped out of the movie, the other characters are stuck. They can't finish their story without Tom Baxter. But he's dashed off with Cecelia to experience the real world and won't come back!

Pretty soon, the movie brass and the real Gil Shepherd arrive to try to figure out how to deal with the dilemma, and Cecelia is caught not just between her husband, a lout played by Danny Aiello, and fictional Tom in his jaunty jodhpurs, but between Gil and Tom, as well.

Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis contrasted the elegant black and white of the "Purple Rose" movie-within-the-movie with faded reds and browns to characterize Depression-era New Jersey, setting the mood and giving the movie a soft-focus look that works very well.

The cast is extraordinary, with wonderful actors like Edward Herrmann, John Wood, Deborah Rush, Van Johnson and Zoe Caldwell inhabiting the sophisticated on-screen world of cocktails and Art Deco penthouses, Dianne Wiest and a young Glenne Headly showing up as hookers, and Mia Farrow's sister Stephanie as Cecelia's sister.

But it's Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels who really shine. Farrow makes downtrodden Cecelia sweet and sympathetic, even if she has clearly settled for too little in her life, and beautifully shows how taken she is with the fantasy world that opens up for her so unexpectedly. You can read the doubt and vulnerability, the surprise and delight, on her face as she chooses between real and fantasy, between the world of fake money and fake champagne and the world of real possibilities that inevitably come with real pain. She pairs nicely with Daniels, who creates two compelling characters in naive Tom Baxter and slicker Gil Shepherd, Hollywood star.

Allen's central theme, of how we relate to the movies, how we sink into fantasy life to make the rigors of real life palatable, is fascinating, with just the right mix of comedy and drama to showcase that theme.

"The Purple Rose of Cairo" comes to the Normal Theater tomorrow and Friday, where the vintage movie-going experience should make the movie come that much more alive.

Entertainment Marches On!

I don't know about going out like a lamb, but March is definitely coming in like a lion in terms of local entertainment. It's unusual to have so much happening on the very first day of the month, but that's the way it is for March, 2012.

If you want to go out tonight, you have a choice of great holdovers, promising new stuff, Oscar-winning movies, or a touch of legit* March Madness. First up, what's opening tonight...

Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit" begins its run at Community Players tonight with a 7:30 Pay-What-You-Can preview. "Blithe Spirit" is, to my mind, Coward's best play, brimming with the wit and droll humor Coward is known for. Its plot involves British novelist Charles Condomine, who is married to a sensible woman named Ruth. But when Charles and Ruth host an unfortunate seance with eccentric Madame Arcati, they accidentally conjure up the spirit of Charles' blithe, beautiful, infuriating first wife, Elvira, who isn't too keen on leaving now that she's back. Uh oh. Now Charles is caught between two wives, one ghostly and the other very much alive and not very happy to be supplanted by an invisible rival.

"Blithe Spirit" is directed by Tom Smith for Community Players, with a cast that includes Thom Rakestraw as Charles, Hannah Kerns and Gayle Hess as his wife, past and present, and Judy Stroh as Madame Arcati. Performances continue through March 17.

Also opening tonight is the Station Theatre's production of Gina Gionfriddo's "Becky Shaw," a tart little comedy of its own. "Becky Shaw," whose title references Becky Sharp, the amoral antiheroine and best part of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair,"was a hit at the 2008 Humana Festival and enjoyed subsequent New York and regional productions. It begins with a terrible, terrible, terrible first date, a fix-up, played off against the pair of dewy-eyed newlyweds who fixed them up, commenting on love, romance, sex and sexual ethics in the modern world.

The acerbic humor of "Becky Shaw" is its strength, and it should do very well at the Station under the able direction of Kay Bohannon Holley, with Lindsey Gates Markel, Mathew Green, Mike Prosise, Martha Mills and Joi Hoffsommer in the cast. "Becky Shaw" opens tonight at 8, playing till the 17th.

Meanwhile, you have two other do-not-miss theatrical choices that are finishing up this weekend. People continue to discuss the problem of female playwrights not getting enough productions, but here in Bloomington-Normal, we have four more performances of Theresa Rebeck's snappy, dark and jaded "Mauritius," about sisters and shady wheeler-dealers battling over a valuable stamp collection, at Heartland Theatre, and three more performances of Caryl Churchill's sprightly but provocative gender-bent comedy "Cloud 9" at ISU's Westhoff theatre..

ISU also has two smaller productions opening tonight, with Vanessa Stalling and Matt Campbell directing Young Jean Lee's "Pullman, WA" and Heather Raffo's "9 Parts of Desire," respectively. Those two shows, more chances to support the work of female playwrights, play this weekend only, both closing on Sunday, March 4.

The women playwrights celebration continues at Illinois Wesleyan University, with April de Angelis's "Playhouse Creatures" taking a bow on March 6 in the E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre. Christopher Connelly directs this bawdy look at English theater in the 17th century, when women were first allowed to trod the boards (instead of men playing all the roles) and Nell Gwynn went from Orange Girl to theatrical star. IWU's box office page says there are only three performances March 6-8, which means you'll need to be quick on your feet if you want to see this one.

The Normal Theater offers a mini Woody Allen Film Fest with two of his best, "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Annie Hall" playing on the big, beautiful screen March 15-16 and 17-18, respectively. 'The Purple Rose of Cairo" stars Mia Farrow as an unhappy wife who loves to lose herself in movies, and Jeff Daniels as the pith-helmeted leading man who leaps off the screen into her life, while "Annie Hall" is the quintessential Allen romantic comedy, about a man very much like Woody who falls for a woman very much like Diane Keaton, and all the sweet, bittersweet and humorous quirks in their relationship.

On screen, the movie that just swept the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Oscars, "The Artist" is available right now in Champaign at The Art Theater, where they promise us that they have the only "beautiful 35mm print" in town. If you miss it there but want the vintage movie theater experience, you can try to catch it at the Normal Theater March 29-31. That was unconfirmed as of today, but the Normal Theater invites you to keep an eye on their Facebook page for details as the time gets closer.

New Route Theatre gears up for 2012 with its first "One Shot Deal," a reprise of "The Mystical Willie Lynch," Gregory Hicks' poetic exploration of the lasting repercussions of slavery on African-American history, on March 21 at the Eaton Gallery.

Over in Champaign, Parkland College's production of "Pinkalicious, the Musical," directed by J.W. Morrissette, continues through March 10, the University of Illinois opera program opens Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" tonight in Krannert Center's Tryon Festival Theatre, and the Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company (CUTC) will offer the rollicking musical comedy, "The Producers," directed by Mikel Matthews, beginning March 15.

Late in the month, Shozo Sato returns to U of I with his production of "Lady Macbeth: A Kabuki Play," conceived by Sato and written by Karen Sunde. The U of I Department of Theatre says that this take on Shakespeare "retells the Scottish Play from the power-driven perspective of the would-be queen." Further, "[w]ith this evocative production, the Department of Theatre joins the National Theatre Conference’s Initiative to Celebrate American Women Playwrights."

Good for you, U of I. And thank you, ISU, IWU, Heartland, and the Celebration Company at the Station Theatre, for doing your part, as well. I doubt that most of them are focusing on female playwrights on purpose, but even a happy coincidence is to be celebrated.

*Legit March Madness refers to high school basketball in Illinois, where the term "March Madness" was coined. I will tell you all about how that happened someday. For right now, suffice it to say that if I say "March Madness," I mean Illinois and I mean high school. This one's for you, H.V. Porter!