Woody Allen’s Recent Movies

by Kirk Woodward

[Like George Bernard Shaw and the Beatles (did you ever figure those two names would appear together in the same sentence?), filmmaker Woody Allen is a subject of some interest to Kirk Woodward, my friend of many years who’s been a prolific contributor to ROT.  Kirk’s last two posts on this blog have been about the great Irish writer (“Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September) and the Fab Four (“Now, Live, The Non-Beatles,” 27 September), and now Kirk returns with an article about reviewers (another favorite topic—he wrote a whole book about reviewing) and Allen’s latest films.  (Kirk also wrote about Allen before on ROT: he posted an article about “Bullets Over Bullets Over Broadway” on 29 August 2014.)  As in both “Re-Reading Shaw” and “Now, Live,” Kirk writes about his own take on things, based on his experience and observation.  And as with the recent past posts, you may disagree with some of what Kirk says in “Woody Allen’s Recent Movies,” but once again, I maintain that his thoughtfulness and perspicacity make his opinions and conclusions worth considering—even if you’re not a particular fan of Allen’s filmmaking.]                                                                                         

Woody Allen (b. 1935) famously does not believe in God or an afterlife. I hope he’s wrong, if only because I want him to be able to enjoy the critical praise his films are due, and I’m afraid he’s going have to wait until he joins the choir invisible for that to happen.

Many people, in the arts and in other fields, are taken for granted until they’ve passed on, at which point they are idolized. That’s likely to be the case with Allen. All his work – all 1100 or so hours of it – will (I’m guessing) then be issued in one collection, probably on some digital device the size of a toenail clipping, and films that are now essentially disregarded will be considered important for their imagination and creativity.

By my count, Woody Allen has been involved in some seventy-three films to date. He has written around fifty of them, directed forty-nine, and acted in some fifty-five. Obviously there is a lot of overlap here – I count thirty-eight films for which he was the (or in a few cases “a”) writer, director, and actor. (As best I can tell, I’ve seen about half of the total seventy-three.)

I’m not saying that Allen has been ignored, because obviously that’s not the case. He is the subject of a shelf of analytical books, mostly admiring. He is enormously respected in the film-making community, and actors say they consider it a career highlight to be in a Woody Allen film.

But the reviewers . . . ah, that’s a different story. Reviewers often write, so to speak, with their eyes on the rear-view mirror. In Allen’s case, they frequently don’t really review his current film, they review his past career.

A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times (14 July 2016) of Allen’s most recent film, Café Society (2016), is a typical example. Even the headline for the review – likely not written by Scott, of course – reads, “‘Café Society Isn’t Woody Allen’s Worst Movie” – a reference to Allen’s career right there – and Scott goes on to describe the film as “neither an example of bad, late Woody Allen nor much in the way of return to form.”

Wendy Ide in The Guardian (4 September 2016) writes, “It’s not in the same league as Allen’s finest work, but neither is it a honking misfire like Magic in the Moonlight.” Adam Graham in the Detroit News (29 July 2016) says “. . . it doesn’t reach the heights of Woody’s best . . . .” Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post (21 July 2016) says, “With each succeeding year, Allen’s insular version of the past feels more eccentric.” Examples can be multiplied.

To my mind this is both this strikes me as both a lazy and an offensive approach for a reviewer to take. I say “offensive” because it patronizes an artist who has made significant contributions to film, to comedy, and for that matter to culture. I say “lazy” because what I would describe as a ho-hum attitude of superiority is an easy one for a reviewer to assume – unearned, but easy.

I maintain that a reviewer’s responsibility is to confront the work at hand. I want to know, as if I had never seen another movie, what this one has to offer. Only by approaching a piece of art that way, it seems to me, is a reviewer able to see and describe what might be new, significant, or even revelatory about a particular film.

The career-evaluation approach to reviewing strikes me as one step removed from the gossip columnists’ – “Old Woody isn’t the filmmaker he used to be.” What does that have to do with the movie at hand? But comparing past and present movies is an easy game. It’s also a bad habit.

No one’s art is the same today as it was yesterday. To take another example, Bob Dylan isn’t writing “Blowing In the Wind” any more. Why should he? He wrote it years ago. What’s he writing now? What does it have to offer? Is it valuable or not? Talk about what someone has done, and you won’t have to talk about what they’re doing.

As a result, a great deal of worthwhile work is overlooked. I would argue for the merits of a number of films by Woody Allen that are generally ignored – for example, from his middle period, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Small Town Crooks (2000), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), and Hollywood Ending (2002).

None of these are remembered as “Woody Allen classics,” and some were panned and/or did badly at the box office. All of them, I submit, would have been considered delightful work if they were not looked at as “Woody Allen films.” Under that burden they could not be “seen” for themselves.

Obviously I am expressing my own highly debatable opinions, but another point can be objectively demonstrated. There is no such thing as a “typical Woody Allen film” because his films are significantly different from each other. They are structured differently, they use different narrative devices, they have widely different kinds of characters.

Certainly elements recur. It would be remarkable if they did not, since one person, Allen, is their prime creator. (Recurring elements appear in Shakespeare’s plays too.) But Allen works hard to differentiate his films. He finds inspiration in numerous sources, and he uses a variety of narrative structures.

I would like to demonstrate this point by looking at five recent films that Allen has written and directed, and in some cases appeared in.

SPOILER ALERT: In order to discuss the various twists of these movies, I have to at least hint at some important – sometimes crucial – plot elements. If you haven’t seen Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man in particular, stay away from the following.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)

This delightful film was both a critical and a popular success; it won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and earned the most money among Woody Allen’s recent films. The narrative hook in this film is . . .

I TOLD YOU THERE’D BE SPOILERS! THERE’LL BE OTHERS! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

. . . time travel. Owen Wilson plays a writer in modern-day Paris whose favorite time period is the 1920’s. Having problems both with his fiancée and with the novel he’s trying to write, he finds himself traveling, each midnight, into the Paris of that era, where Hemingway challenges him to box, Gertrude Stein reads and evaluates his novel, and Surrealistic painter Salvador Dali visualizes him as a rhinoceros. From a narrative point of view, perhaps the most interesting twist is that a detective, hired to shadow the writer, gets himself stuck in an even earlier time period, and can’t get out.

TO ROME WITH LOVE (2012)

I enjoyed this film almost as much as I enjoyed Midnight in Paris, which is saying something, but the two are radically different. The mood of Midnight is romantic and serene; the mood of Rome is boisterous. A narrator introduces and closes the film (there is no narrator in Midnight). The film intertwines four separate stories told in differing comic styles; it crosscuts between the stories, but presents them in different time frames: for example, one may take a day, another one a number of days.

·         A not terribly successful opera director (played by Woody Allen) discovers a “natural talent,” a tenor who, unfortunately, can only sing when he’s in the shower.

·         An American woman and her husband, inadvertently separated, each become involved in potentially compromising farce situations..

·         Leopoldo, a staggeringly average Italian man, finds that for no apparent reason he has become a celebrity, with his every move, including what he had for breakfast, captured by the army of reporters following him.

·         Jack, an architecture student, meets John, a successful older architect, who accompanies Jack – visibly or invisibly, in fact or in imagination – as he tries to sort out his love life.

Together these four storylines form a sort of seminar on the possibilities of light comedy. The story of Leopoldo is particularly brilliant, in our age, when people frequently become celebrities for odd reasons (“reality” TV shows) or even for no reasons at all.

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT (2014)

In this film, and the next, Woody Allen plays with familiar metaphysical themes – God, death, a meaningful universe. The center of this plot is literally magic: two magicians try to determine whether or not a medium really has supernatural gifts or not. More than that: the plot is literally an elaborate magic trick. I can’t say any more, in order not to spoil the fun for anyone who wants to see the movie, and I hope you will, but I don’t know any other plot that works like this, and it’s a brilliant idea. Some reviewers said the dialogue was uninspired. I suppose they mean that it doesn’t have a lot of gags in it – not that those would be appropriate for the movie, which is deliberately a period piece. A. O. Scott, in his review (24 July 2014), wrote, “Mr. Allen has had his ups and downs over the years.” Need I say more on that subject?

IRRATIONAL MAN (2015)

Irrational Man is a suspense film with a sort of Hitchcock construction to it, as a woman (Emma Stone) becomes increasingly aware that her philosophy professor, testing the idea that a universe without God is meaningless and therefore that every action is equally absurd, has committed a murder, and is likely to have to commit another one – hers. The climax of the action is brilliantly staged – it happens in the blink of an eye, and calls into question much that has previously happened in the film. Reviewers tended to say that the film was dull, which I don’t understand.

CAFÉ SOCIETY (2016)

Unlike the movies discussed above, Café Society is a thoroughly, almost novelistically narrated film, which allows Allen to skip a great deal of exposition for the large number of characters, and move quickly to their central dilemmas. The love triangle between young Bobby, eager to get out of Brooklyn; his uncle Phil, a major movie agent in Los Angeles; and Vonnie, Phil’s secretary, is a strong story in itself – and the way the characters find out what’s happening is skillfully presented – but the story also allows Allen to demonstrate without preaching that “café society” – the life of the comfortably rich – is not life’s ultimate satisfaction. The bittersweet ending embodies this theme: just because a person has everything, doesn’t mean they have everything.

Even a cursory survey of the five movies shows how different they are from each other. There simply is no sense – even if it were good practice – to view these films as basically one long movie directed by Woody Allen. I can’t think of any equally prolific artist who has produced so many works of such variety. Certainly Allen’s films contain themes, motifs, and even plot elements that can be tracked from one movie to another – as is likely to be the case with any artist over a long career. (I cited Shakespeare as an example; I could also cite Eugene O’Neill.) It seems pointless to stop there, and not look at the way Allen handles his material this time.

A review, I maintain, should consider and reflect the work being looked at – not at something else. Criticism, as opposed to reviewing, can take a broader view, and a critical look at an artist’s entire career may be legitimate for a critic. Reviewing has a different focus. It reports on the work at hand.

I could be belligerent and ask what the reviewers’ outstanding contributions to art that allow them to patronize, say, Woody Allen might be. They might properly reply that their contributions are in the field of reviewing, and that a reviewer is an artist too. I agree, and I have no right to look down my nose at their accomplishments. I see much to applaud in various reviews, looked at one at a time. I just want reviewers to review Allen’s movies according to the nature of each one – not as mere signposts in a career. That, I submit, is the heart of the artistry of a reviewer.

[Kirk’s book about reviewing I mentioned in my introduction, for the curious ROTter, is The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press/Lulu, 2009), available to order or download at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272; potential readers can also access this site through Spiceplays, Kirk’s own webpage, http://spiceplays.com/id7.html.  I also wrote a four-part commentary on Kirk’s book which I posted on ROT: “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009.

[When the reviews of Café Society came out last July, I thought I spotted a similarity between the film’s plot and the plot of a Woody Allen play I’d seen Off-Broadway back in 2004, A Second Hand Memory.  I mentioned this to Kirk and he did a search to see if anyone else found the same connection.  Turned out, someone did: Don Steinberg in the Wall Street Journal of 8 July commented on the plot similarity and the blog The Woody Allen Pages remarked on the WSJ’s mention in “New Café Society Interviews Discuss Production And New York” on 7 July.  On 1 September 2014, I posted my 2004 report on Second Hand Memory on ROT.] 

'A Second Hand Memory' (2004)

[On 29 August, I posted an article by Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, on the Broadway production of the musical stage adaptation of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, based on his 1994 film of the same title.  Kirk used the musical, now closed, to look at why some musicals fare better than others.  In his discussion, Kirk noted that Allen had had some experience directing for the stage, most notably at New York City’s Atlantic Theater Company.  One of the productions the filmmaker and playwright staged there was his own play, A Second Hand Memory, presented at ATC from 22 November 2004 to 23 January 2005 at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea.  I saw that production and wrote a report on the presentation dated 13 December 2004, so I’m posting that archival record for readers of ROT to look back at a different sort of stage effort from the famous filmmaker.  (I also saw Allen’s play The Floating Light Bulb at Lincoln Center Theatre Company’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, presented from 27 April to 21 June 1981 under the direction of Ulu Grosbard, but I have no written record of that production.)]

I have to question the perspicacity of the people at the Atlantic Theater Company: What made you even consider staging A Second Hand Memory?  (Okay, I know part of the answer to this one: two words—Woody Allen.)

Charles Isherwood nailed it.  I had read his New York Times review well before I saw the show.  (It opened just before Thanksgiving; the review’d been out for over two weeks.)  I went in determined to disagree with the review—because I just didn’t want to see another disappointing production; I wanted to like this one.  Unhappily, I can’t argue with Isherwood’s evaluation.  

Isherwood suggests that Allen’s play may have started out as a screenplay, and that may be true.  It zips around from Brooklyn to L.A., from the present (ca. 1955) to various points in the past, from “real” scenes (either past or present) to dreams and imaginary conversations with an absent character who serves as narrator (voice-over in a film, I’d imagine).  This can be disconcerting at times, since Santo Loquasto’s set never changes (nor does James F. Ingalls’s lighting for the most part) and sometimes a character will begin to do or say something that doesn’t seem to make sense relative to the immediate preceding moment—until you realize, they’re not in the apartment in the present now, they’ve transported to the past and they’re in the old house!  (The first time this happened to me, I only realized what had occurred on stage because I had read Isherwood’s review and he mentions this aspect of the production.  In other words, I only understood what was going on on stage because a reviewer had explained it to me.  That shouldn’t happen.)

I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself, I guess.  The play, like most of Allen’s works, film or stage, is about his family.  They’re the Wolfes here, and son Eddie is Woody.  I won’t précis the plot for you, but I’ll tell you that Eddie (Nicky Katt) fled Brooklyn and pop’s jewelry business to work for his mother’s brother, a big agent in Hollywood.  He gets called back home when pop (Dominic Chianese) discovers that his bookkeeper and the man he took on to “replace” Eddie have robbed the business blind and he’s about to lose everything and Eddie has to come back to help him rebuild.  The resentments and sense of oppressiveness build all around as everyone—mom, pop, sister Alma (Elizabeth Marvel, the narrator, who’s not really “present”), Uncle Phil (Michael McKean), Eddie, and Eddie’s new wife (Kate Blumberg)—all harbor secrets, unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, conflicts, and wounds.  It’s all very, very contrived—the deck is so stacked that it would take a Ricky Jay to sort it all out.  

None of the characters is remotely sympathetic—or even pleasant to be around briefly.  Why someone hadn’t committed homicide before the play began is a mystery to me—though it’d be hard to pick one deserving victim from among the many available prospects.  The worst problem from a dramatic perspective is that, even among the unpleasant crew, there’s no one to care about.  I never once wanted anyone to win out over the arranged circumstances.  No one deserved to get out—so the end, whatever it turned out to be, wasn’t significant.  Not even the narrator-sister, who got out of the family early, has any claim on our sympathy.  Like everyone else, she’s supremely selfish.  She’s also extremely undramatic/untheatrical as a stage device—a cheap way to advance the plot.  (As it happens, the play doesn’t “end”; it just stops, with a deus ex machina that’s even more contrived than the rest of the plot.  And everyone loses, to one degree or another.)

There was nothing of Allen’s cleverness and idiosyncratic view of the world in the script.  There was no humor to enliven the abject misery.  Even the dialogue is brittle and artificial—almost as if it were a translation from some foreign language.  Allen also directed, so the line deliveries are his responsibility, and every character uttered words and phrases no one would use in ordinary conversation as glibly and automatically as these people did.  Not one actor stopped to collect his or her words or come up with the turns of phrase that just tumble out of everyone’s mouths.  They all talked like a writer writing—and I didn’t believe any of it for a minute.  (Even though the play has been running now for about three weeks, many of the cast had line bobbles that seem out of place.  This wasn’t an amateur cast—it’s headed by Chianese of The Sopranos as well as many stage productions.  I don’t know what this signifies, if anything, but it surprised me.)  By the way, this is where I disagreed slightly with Isherwood—though the consequence is minimal at most.  He objected to the acting of Nicky Katt, who lists only film and TV credits in his bio.  I didn’t find him any worse than the rest of the cast—who all seemed to be doing the best they could with the material.  Isherwood saw the show long enough ago that perhaps Katt has improved with experience (and, maybe, coaching).  His character, however, has clearly not improved—but that’s not his fault.

As I suggested above, I have to ask why the Atlantic would commit to a play as obviously bad as this.  Maybe it looked better than it turned out to be—though I can’t see any reason to assume the directing can have fixed or damaged the script.  Maybe Allen revised the script downward during rehearsal, but I suspect not.  As I said, the only answer I can give to my own question is that Atlantic liked the idea of doing a Woody Allen play—regardless of its quality.  I therefore question their judgment.  (If I’m right—and no one can say I am, but so what?—the reasoning goes something like this:  “Let’s do a play by a famous writer.  It’s a bad play, but we can sell it on his name.  It doesn’t matter that we then have to inflict the bad play on our audience.  That’s all right, because we make some money.”  It’s sort of laissez-faire capitalist reasoning.)

(What is it with producers these days, anyway?  I raised questions regarding Trying, the Fritz Weaver vehicle Off-Broadway, about why the play would be moved to New York from Chicago.  Now the Atlantic makes me wonder about their selections, and so does BAM with its selection of John Jesurun’s FAUST/How I Rose and David Gordon’s execrable version of Ionesco’s The Chairs.  Meanwhile, August Wilson has trouble keeping backers for Gem of the Ocean and almost loses a production because of it.  Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?)

I have to add one more thing about the Allen play.  About its title really.  Shouldn’t it read A Second-Hand Memory—with a hyphen?  His way, the title refers to something called a “hand memory”—whatever that would be—and the play is about the second one.  Okay, it’s silly, I suppose—but it’s annoying.  (The title refers to the fact that Alma, who is the storyteller, wasn’t actually present for any of the events of the play: she’s relying on “memories” that aren’t her own—things she gleaned from other sources.  In other words, ‘second-hand memories.’  Now that I think about it, that may be the best thing in the whole play—the title.  Unfortunately, the fact that it has to be explained by a narrator figure kind of ruins that one asset.  It’s sort of like the Beatles song quotes Jesurun salted into the script of FAUST: once a character actually acknowledges them, they’re no longer any fun.)

Bullets Over 'Bullets Over Broadway'

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent guest blogger on ROT, has come through with another interesting contribution.  Having caught a performance of Woody Allen’s musical stage adaption of his film Bullets Over Broadway, Kirk provides his assessment of the play and the production and as usual, he uses the performance as a way to discuss something more general (dare I say “universal”?) about musical theater.  Readers of ROT will know by now that that’s a subject about which Kirk knows a little something; he’s written on the genre before: “The Scottsboro Brecht,” 12 February 2011; “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October 2011; “The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October 2011; “Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time,” 1 November 2011; and “Lady Gaga and Once,” 5 May 2014.

[Given the subject of this post, readers might also want to turn back to my own article “Movicals,” 20 September 2013, and the republished pieces in “More on Movicals,” 21 February 2014.]

I saw the Broadway musical Bullets Over Broadway the Musical, at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan, on Wednesday, August 7, 2014, and by that time the show, which opened on April 10, 2014, had already posted its closing notice for August 24, 2014, by which date it would have run for 33 previews and 124 performances. This makes it, in financial terms, a flop; it cost a reported $14 million to produce, and it will not have made back any of that investment.

Still, there are flops and flops. The show is bound to have a performance afterlife in university and community theater productions. What’s more, it had an afterlife with me too. I left the theater feeling I’d seen an enjoyable but maybe not terribly memorable show. Memorable, however, is what it turned out to be; I found that the next day I was thinking extensively about it, and I came to realize that I’ve learned something important about musical theater because of it.

Bullets Over Broadway is based on a film written (with Douglas McGrath, who this season is represented on Broadway by the book for the musical Beautiful) and directed by Woody Allen. Obviously Allen is a well-known figure, with so many accomplishments to his name that his biography in the program for Bullets reads, in its entirety, “WOODY ALLEN is a film director, actor and writer. His career spans more than six decades, and he has contributed to nightclubs, concert, television, theatre, literature and music.” Indeed he has. In 1994 the film version of Bullets Over Broadway was nominated for six Academy Awards. In 1996, Allen directed a musical film, Everyone Says I Love You, with a score made up of songs from previous decades. In 2014 he combined the two approaches: Bullets Over Broadway, the stage musical, has a score with songs like “Runnin’ Wild,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave,” in addition to some less known blues numbers. 

But films and Broadway musicals are significantly different creatures. It is relatively easy for a director to control the tone of a movie; Allen is a master at it. On the other hand, a Broadway musical is notoriously difficult to control, no matter how smooth the process can seem when the results are successful. A song, a situation, a character can run away with a musical, leaving the rest of it looking lost and forlorn. (A good book on this subject is Second Act Trouble by Steven Suskin, published in 2006.)

Woody Allen has experience as a theater director (with the Atlantic Theatre Company), but considering the complexity of the musical theater form, he was wise to enlist as director and choreographer for Bullets the formidable Susan Stroman, who has done remarkable work with shows such as The Producers, Crazy For You, and the stunning John Kander and Fred Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys. 

Stroman has the notable ability to understand her assignment. In the case of Bullets, her task was to make the show “go” with machine-like (I almost said machine gun-like) force, so the audience would be carried through certain complexities.

Because . . . there are complexities in the show. It has levels. The most obvious level, perhaps, is the one that must have made it seem likely that the musical would be a financial success: as its title suggests, it promises theatricality. That was Stroman’s department, and she and her colleagues made the most of it. In addition to the vigorous and satisfying dancing (she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Choreography), she staged the show like, well, like a bullet, with plenty of fast-paced movement. Stroman knows how to shape a song, a scene, or an act, so its climax occurs at just the right moment.

But speaking of bullets, here’s the next level of complexity: the musical is about gangsters who kill people. It’s not that the subject of killing is off limits in Broadway musicals, going at least as far back as George Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet in the musical On Your Toes (1936), right up through Sweeney Todd. Certainly the violence in Bullets is cartoon style – there’s no blood. But the gangsters of Bullet’s plot are real gangsters, whose jobs involve killing people rather casually, unlike the gangsters in, say, Kiss Me Kate, Guys and Dolls, and The Drowsy Chaperone, who are basically song and dance men in extra large suits. 

Allen needs a certain amount of realism in his gangsters to set up the contrasts in his story, because the next level of the show is a serious theme, set up in an early discussion along these lines: Suppose you could save either the last copy of Shakespeare’s plays, or the life of a down-and-out bum. Which would you save? The show works this question out in varied ways. The Greenwich Village group we see at the beginning of the first act is art- (and politics-) obsessed, and at least one member of the group thinks the question is no contest – he’d save the art rather than the (allegedly valueless) human being. Later in the show he may rethink his position.

The gangsters, of course, wouldn’t save a life for love or money – quite the contrary - unless ordered to by the Boss. Human life has no value for them. One of Allen’s inspirations in the movie and play is that one of the gangsters becomes so involved in the world of art that he potentially might – not surprisingly, considering his line of work – kill for it. Meanwhile – a fine twist – the people in the show who are dedicated to the arts are willing to sell out their artistic values altogether, just to make a little money in the field.

This theme of value in life and art is not just tossed at the audience. It’s embodied in the story of the play, in ways both obvious and subtle. It is not, however, particularly embodied in the songs interpolated throughout the script, and that may be a weakness in the show. Another weakness is that the play-within-the-play is not particularly interesting. But at any rate Allen is not making easy points about life and art – he’s tackling them in meaningful ways, and expressing them through character.

I will mention one more level of complexity in Bullets (there may be others I haven’t noticed). Allen’s humor adds a level of complexity of its own to the work, because it’s earthy but it’s also sophisticated. This is not the place to rehash the art of Woody Allen’s comedy; volumes, quite literally, have been written about it. The point is that in most Broadway musicals the jokes are so massively structured that it would take a very dull audience member to miss them. There are a few jokes like that in Bullets, but at the performance I saw, the big laughs were few – and the smaller laughs were frequent, as someone here, someone there, caught something clever that Allen had written for a character. “Humor,” Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “is a concealed pair.” In other words, humor – humor that’s well executed – contains real complexity inside itself. Allen knows humor.

What then did I learn about musicals by seeing Bullets Over Broadway? I realized that in any successful musical, the elements are of a piece – not identical to each other, but basically homogenous. Annie Get Your Gun and Pippin are very different shows, but in each the various elements connect closely to each other. In Bullets Woody Allen took the risk – a perfectly sensible one for him to take, considering the nature of his art – that he could combine disparate elements into a musical that “worked.” 

This was not a case of ineptly connecting the parts; it was a worthy, even “artistic” endeavor, but it didn’t entirely succeed. For the most part reviewers did not agree with Allen. Two of the three New York daily papers disliked the show; other reviews were similarly mixed. The reviews didn’t agree with me either – no notice I read indicated that the show had any significance at all. Instead, reviewers were mostly irritated because it wasn’t funnier. Woody Allen has been fighting that very battle for years – “why isn’t he funnier? He used to be funny.” Reviewers often review careers, not plays. That’s Woody Allen’s lot in life.

I should note that Bullets was nominated for six Tony Awards. I already mentioned Stroman’s nomination for Best Choreography, and Allen was nominated for Best Book, a nomination I’d say he certainly deserved. Nick Cordero received a deserved Featured Actor nomination, and he had some fine colleagues on stage: Zach Braff of the TV series Scrubs; Vincent Pastore from The Sopranos once again playing a very believable gangster; and the splendid Marin Mazzie and Karen Ziemba, among other members of the play-within-a-play. There were also nominations for costumes (Ivey Long), sound (Peter Hylenski), and, particularly notably, for Scenic Design (Santo Loquasto) that featured settings whisked up from under the stage while the previous scene was just finishing, and one astonishing set that whirled around the stage at the climax of the play like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

None of those nominated won. They’ll have to be satisfied with the values of art.

[Kirk will be back with more interesting and provocative examinations of topics theatrical and other.  I know some of what he’s got in the works or on his mind, but it’s too soon to preview them.  I can only attest that each idea he’s considering is well worth hearing and I urge ROTters to come back often to catch his contributions to the dialogue.  In the meantime, ROT readers are invited to return to the blog in a few days for an archival report on one of Woody Allen’s self-directed productions, A Second Hand Memory which I saw at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2004.]