Broadway Bounty Hunter: Review and Pics of Joe Iconis Musical Starring Annie Golden

The actress Annie Golden (mute Norma in Orange Is the New Black)  stars as the actress Annie Golden, who exchanges the humiliations of auditions for the thrills of a career kick-boxing dangerous criminals in this Off-Broadway musical. Well-meaning, cleverly designed and terrifically sung, Broadway Bounty Hunter has a game and talented cast, a funky pastiche R&B score composed by Joe Iconis, the Tony-nominated songwriter of Be More Chill, and a plot that couldn’t be sillier.

In a note in the script, Iconis and his two fellow book authors explain what they’re trying to do: The show takes its form and style from the blaxploitation and martial arts films of the 1970s, and hopes to do for “women of a certain age” what those films did for African-Americans and Asian-Americans — put them center stage. “We’re dealing with stereotypes and then subverting those stereotypes,” they write, and emphasize: “It’s a musical comedy, but it’s not a parody.”

If the aim of putting an older woman center stage is certainly laudable,  I don’t think it follows that the best way to do so is by imitating a 40-year-old over-the-top violent B movie genre. And for all their laughable claims otherwise, the scent of parody seems unavoidable.

 

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Author: New York Theater

Jonathan Mandell is a 3rd generation NYC journalist, who sees shows, reads plays, writes reviews and sometimes talks with people.

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