One reason I usually come to New York this week each year is that it marks the deadline for Tony Award eligibility, and many shows open at the last opportunity, like doing homework in home room just before it is due. But the main reason is to catch The Easter Bonnet Competition, a two-day event that marks the end of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising season.
To celebrate it, the casts of many shows write and perform skits that poke fun at their own show and at other shows, their scenes climaxing in the arrival of a huge bonnet, often with animation or special effects concocted by the show’s tech crew.
The Easter Bonnet Competition, which has been going for the past 28 years by now, is a great coming together of the New York theater community. And year in and year out, it is one of the most entertaining productions around. (It is certainly better than the lavish, vacant multimillion dollar musical I saw afterwards, but I am getting ahead of myself.)
The Bonnet is usually populated with members of the current shows’ ensembles, but occasionally, the stars get involved, like an unlisted Tyne Daly who barged into a skit by Terrence McNally (the author of Mothers and Sons) with some nicely snarky lines. By the end of the afternoon, when awards were given out for the best bonnets and most money raised during the begathon period, they were presented by Idina Menzel (If/Then), Bryan Cranston (All the Way), Fran Drescher (Cinderella) and Denzel Washington (A Raisin in the Sun). The show culminated in the announcement that this year alone $4,532,129 was raised by theater casts to help those with AIDS and other health-related emergencies. How could you not love a program like this?
In fact, this was an off year at the Easter Bonnet Competition, with too many skits falling flat, but it was still vastly better than Bullets Over Broadway, the new Susan Stroman-directed and choreographed musical, based on Woody Allen’s 1988 movie comedy of the same name. I remember interviewing the Woodman soon after Mel Brooks became the King of Broadway in 2001 with The Producers. I asked him if he had any interest in a movie of his being adapted into a Broadway musical and he insisted that would never happen.
Well, he should have stuck to that refusal, for no one comes off well in Bullets Over Broadway. Allen’s script is a lazy rewrite of his screenplay, Stroman’s dances are generic and pointless, the score is culled from songs of the ’20s and ’30s — much like the soundtracks of Allen’s films — but they rarely seemed necessary or even relevant to the story. Zach Braff makes his Broadway debut as naive rookie playwright David Shayne and he acquits himself well enough, but musicals are hardly his strength. They are for the usually terrific Marin Mazzie (Ragtime, Passion, Kiss Me Kate), but even she cannot overcome the cartoonish nature of her role as Helen (“Don’t speak!”) Sinclair.
There are many musicals this season, but no single blockbuster front-runner for the top Tony, It seemed like Bullets Over Broadway could have walked off with it. Now I doubt it will even be nominated for Best Musical.