Broadway Bounty Hunter

Ya gotta love Annie Golden. She has a sweetness to her, with a wild voice and a slightly goofy vibe. For a creative team to decide to shape a musical around her--even going so far as to name the main character "Annie Golden"--is a no-brainer, particularly now that Golden is famous outside of theatre from her stint on Orange Is the New Black. 

Golden, Green
Photo: Matthew Murphy

Broadway Bounty Hunter is the story of a "woman of a certain age" who has lost her husband and seems to be losing her career. She feels terribly unappreciated and worries about her future, telling her woes to the photo she keeps of her beloved late spouse. The path in front of her seems dire, at best.

And then Annie is recruited to be a bounty hunter. After intense training, she is sent with a reluctant partner to South America to bring back the drug lord Mac Roundtree. Unsurprisingly, Annie and the partner grow to like each other.

Every part of Broadway Bounty Hunter plays with-satirizes-honors-relies on '80s movie styles or cliché tropes or other musical satires or union organizing (really) or the usefulness of acting skills in real-life situations. The energetic cast works their butts off as the show roller-coasters from event to event, song to song, dance to dance, and joke to joke. It is a noisy, in-your-face, overdone, silly evening. And if you like that sort of thing, you might well love it.

I sometimes like that sort of thing, and I had mixed feelings. The noisiness became abrasive; the stage was too small; the chorus was too small; many lyrics were lost when more than one person was singing; the almost-constant dancing lacked creativity and polish; the cast was uneven; the score was uneven; Golden's big second act number was bland; the show was too long; and, although I hate to say this, Golden seemed harried by the frenetic pace and wasn't as good as she usually is. Oh, and the seats at the theatre offer neither comfort nor decent sight lines.

The strengths: some great jokes; some nice songs; Alan H. Green as Annie's reluctant partner; Brad Oscar as Mac Roundtree; Emily Borromeo as the martial arts master who recruits Annie; Annie Golden's singing and presence; the generally good-hearted, enthusiastic vibe.

To mix metaphors, Broadway Bounty Hunter is a mixed bag, but it may be your cup of tea.

Wendy Caster
(8th row, press ticket)

Broadway Bounty Hunter video.

Violet

Few people look directly at Violet (Sutton Foster), and those who do tend to react in unsettling, unsubtle ways. Badly scarred as a child by an axehead that flew off its handle, Violet has grown as used to carefully averted eyes as she has to taunts and lightning-fast reactions that reflect pity or disgust. The ugly, jagged scar the accident left on her face matches the emotional scarring she has subsequently sustained. At 25, Violet is sad about or angry at just about everything: at her mother for dying and leaving her and her father (Alexander Gemignani) alone in their poor, rural, southern home; at her doting father, who was using the offending axe and who, like Violet, can't forgive himself; at the people she meets who mock her openly; at the people she meets who attempt to be kind.

After a lifetime of wishing the scar away, Violet is damaged and desperate and, despite her cynicism, prone to magical thinking. Hence her decision to take herself and a lot of money on a Greyhound bus all the way to Tulsa to seek out a televangelist she's convinced herself can heal her. On her pilgrimage, Violet meets two servicemen: Monty (Colin Donnell), a white, womanizing partyboy, and Flick (Joshua Henry), an African-American reform-school survivor who wants to make as much of his adult life as he can. This won't be easy, of course: Violet is set in the deep south in 1964. While no longer relegated to the back of the bus, Flick is nevertheless made endlessly aware of the fact that his future won't be as free or as easy as Monty's. Like Violet, he's grown as used to not being looked at as he has to being looked at but not really seen.