Broadway Bounty Hunter – Greenwich House Theater, New York

Picture: Matthew Murphy

Broadway Bounty Hunter continues at Greenwich House Theater, New York until 18 August 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Annie Golden is a Broadway veteran, having made her mark in such productions as The Full Monty, the 1977 revival of Hair and the 1998 redo of On the Town. Off-Broadway she created the role of Squeaky Fromme in Assassins.

Now, exuding a sweet but spunky persona, she’s playing a character named Annie Golden, a fictionalised version of herself, in an Off-Broadway musical entitled Broadway Bounty Hunter.

And while it’s nice to see a worthy toiler from the below-the-title fields of Broadway celebrated (I think that’s the word to use) this way, the show itself – despite some pungent pokes at the tropes of showbiz, a nod to the theme of female empowerment and diversity in casting – is a rather wearying piece of frantic fantasy.

The show features a score by lyricist-composer Joe Iconis, currently represented on Broadway by the soon-to-close Be More Chill, the teen-age frolic whose songs went viral on the Internet, leading to a sold-out Off-Broadway run a year ago.  The momentum carried it to Broadway, where unfortunately it failed to build sustainable box-office among the greying patrons of the Main Stem.

And now Iconis has been hit with another blow. Broadway Bounty Hunter, which had its official press opening on 23 July and was scheduled to run until 15 September, has posted an early closing notice of 18 August.

Iconis also wrote the Broadway Bounty Hunter book with two frequent collaborators, Lance Rubin and Jason SweetTooth Williams. The story depicts Annie Golden as “A Woman of a Certain Age”, as she sings in the opening number, an actress who can no longer book a job, who’s treated curtly at auditions and told her headshot is out of date. She hasn’t paid her electric bill and the power is turned off in her apartment.

Her fortunes suddenly shift when a group of mysterious intruders bust into her place, and through none of her own doing, she’s inducted into a group called the Broadway Bounty Hunters. As their leader, the svelte and spooky lady named Shiro Jin (Emily Borromeo) explains, they are “hired by clients to track down those who have wronged them”.

Annie goes through brief but extensive training, a frenzy of kung-fu choreography devised by director Jennifer Werner, repeated often and performed in galvanising style by the five-person ensemble. Then she is assigned her first mission, bringing back to New York a fellow by the name of Mac Roundtree, a drug-dealing kingpin and pimp sequestered somewhere in the jungles of Ecuador.

Annie will be accompanied by the senior member of the bounty-hunting team, the gruff and sexy Lazarus (Alan H. Green), and if you think that despite initial hostility, romance eventually ignites between the two, you are so right.

More surprising, perhaps, is that when the two catch up with Roundtree at the Act I curtain, he turns out to be none other than Charlie Silver, Annie’s deeply mourned husband, who supposedly died ten years earlier when he faked his demise as a drowning. Charlie was a Broadway producer whose shows not only flopped in a sea of debt but caused their performers to overdose on drugs.

Now with the second act, Charlie – having escaped the clutches of the bounty hunters – is ready to tackle Broadway again. He has developed a stimulant called Fierce that will break the Broadway business model by giving performers the stamina to do 15 shows a week rather than the usual eight.

Charlie is played by another name familiar to Broadway devotees, Brad Oscar, whose abundant credits include Tony Award nominations for Something Rotten! and The Producers. He makes Charlie a convivial conniver.

As the tale convulses to its end, Annie and friends foil Charlie’s plot, with Annie proving herself to be a woman of inner strength. As she belts in her big anthem: “after many great pains/the blood is back in my veins.”

The varied Iconis score, which goes from action-movie pounding to soul-style love song and lilting ballads reminiscent of Annie’s better days, is admirable. The orchestrations by Charlie Rosen frequently wrap them in a jazzy horn and reed-filled Big Band sound. The six-member band is conducted by Geoffrey Ko who plays one of the two keyboards.

The score’s impact, however, is diminished by the forced silliness of the story that surrounds it. An authors’ note introducing the script points out their show was inspired by the blaxploitation and martial arts B-movies of the 1970s and 1980s. But even with a plentitude of colourful sets (by Michael Schweikardt), projections (by Brad Peterson) and costumes (by Sarafina Bush), the fun of the parody runs pretty thin.

However, we can take heart that the real Annie Golden is not the jobless actress portrayed in the show. Along with other bookings including concerts with Iconis, she was a regular on the highly popular streaming television series Orange is the New Black, the women’s prison epic, which recently released its seventh and final season.

So, while Broadway Bounty Hunter may not live up to the showcase in intended to be for her, actual Annie seems to be doing OK.

       Ron Cohen