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THESE PAPER BULLETS! Send This Review to a Friend
Brush up your Shakespeare and re-read “Much Ado About Nothing” and you’ll be better able appreciate the wild riff on that play performed with boundless energy in the current musical “These Paper Bullets!,” written by Rolin Jones, with songs by Billie Joe Armstrong and direction by Jackson Gay. The setting has been set forward to swinging London in 1964, and the hyper-acted characters are paralleling the Bard’s entourage in an update that invites the audience to make who’s who comparisons. The show is the Yale Repertory Theatre production presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in association with Geffen Playhouse.
For starters there is a band called Quartos, obviously summoning memories of the Beatles, and the music dispensed mimics enthusiastically what the Beatles were up to as their fame soared. The fellows skillfully providing the beat here are Bryan Fenkart, James Barry, Justin Kirk and Lucas Papaelias.
The setup proceeds to involve smitten lovers, an evil attempt to falsely charge infidelity with a doctored photograph, a sleazy tabloid journalist, secret recordings, a disrupted wedding and even an appearance by England’s queen. All of it is piled on with dashes of cleverness, abetted by a cast giving its all, but the result is often way too much. Yet the effect is so zany that one can have a good time a good deal of the way and not care a hoot about what is being irreverently done to Shakespeare. After all, this isn’t “King Lear.”
The lovers at the core are Quartos’ Bryan Fenkart as Claude, who falls for Ariana Venturiy as the ditsy model Higgy. The conniver is Adam O’Byrne as Don Best, who is bitter for having been kicked out of the band and replaced (shades of what happened with the Beatles). The doctored photo purports to show Higgy having sex. I’m never much for audience participation, but I was amused when being one of those handed an envelope with instructions not to open until told to do so. Inside, at the appointed moment, there was a gross 8 x 10 picture of supposedly Higgy being taken from the rear. (It’s a better souvenir of the show than Playbill.)
The aborted wedding scene is one of the best, and of course, the denouement when all is worked out adds to the fun. But know in advance that you’ll be in for some way over the top high-jinx that could use trimming. Yet the recalling of those swinging London days has its charm, especially when given a touch of contemporary-looking tabloid corruption. At the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street. Reviewed December 19, 2015.
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