When the producers of Bullets Over Broadway announced this week that the Woody Allen musical would close on August 24th, having played 156 regular and 33 preview performances, Nick Cordero was surprised. “I’m absolutely surprised; people are on their feet and laughing the whole time,” Cordero says in the video below, shot after he and much of the cast performed at a lunchtime concert in Bryant Park.

Critics were generally not in love with the stage adaptation of Allen’s 1994 film, but nearly all of them agreed that Nick Cordero was far more than just a stand-out in the cast. He may well have become a star. At the very least, he may well be the only person involved in Bullets who not only escapes unwounded, but actually emerges better off than he was before. This was only his second show on Broadway (he performed for a few months as a replacement cast member in Rock of Ages, and was best-known up to now as the original star of Off-Broadway’s Toxic Avenger.)

Cordero won an Outer Critics Circle and Theater World Award, and was nominated for  Drama Desk and a Tony for his role as Cheech, the unschooled mobster who knows about playwriting than any of the snooty thespians putting on a play on Broadway. His number, T’Aint Nobody’s Business If I Do, is the indisputable highlight of the show, and brings down the house. It’s no coincidence that it was the number featured both during the Tony broadcast, and at the Broadway in Bryant Park lunchtime concert.