Annie Golden has long been an exceptionally darling actor-singer.
Whether you first saw Golden in the film version of Hair some 40 years ago, met up with her only lately in Orange Is the New Black on Netflix, or enjoyed her appearances in a score of Broadway and Off Broadway shows, most likely you were beguiled by her quirky charms.
Golden’s forever waifish presence and powerhouse voice were cunningly exploited by Stephen Sondheim when she memorably originated the role of Squeaky Fromme in Assassins.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
In much the same way (only more so), Be More Chill songwriter Joe Iconis and his book-writer associates Lance Rubin and Jason Sweettooth Williams now make the amusing utmost of Golden’s personal attributes in Broadway Bounty Hunter, which opened on Tuesday at the Greenwich House Theater.
Not only does Golden assume the leading role in this new screwball musical, but the character she portrays in its daffy doings happens to be a fictional version of herself: Here, Golden plays a same-named showbiz veteran who is a “Woman of a Certain Age,” as one particularly catchy tune in Iconis’ agreeable score terms her.
The story finds our darling Annie cruelly upstaged by younger performers, unable to pay her bills, and still mourning the loss of a husband some ten years earlier. Out of the blue, Annie is recruited into a Manhattan coven of ninja-type bounty hunters. Annie is rapidly schooled in lethal martial arts, teamed with a studly partner named Lazarus, and dispatched with him into the jungles of South America, where they are assigned to extract a “real bad mother drug pusha and pimp daddy” and bring the scoundrel back for justice.
The tuner’s second act, which features a brief lampoon of teen-riddled musicals like Be More Chill among its nutty rock-em, sock-em cartoon happenings, sees Annie uncover a nefarious scheme that threatens to destroy Broadway as we know it. Actually, the giddy script is peppered with plenty of insider show-biz jokes, as in a moment when Lazarus explodes with rage and Annie remarks, “I feel like I’m working with Mandy Patinkin again.”
Crafted as a musical comedy homage to stereotypical exploitation films, with the improbable hero-in-the-making figure being an aging artiste, Broadway Bounty Hunter may be a fairly frivolous affair but it sure is fun to see and nice to hear.
Rendered by a six-musician band, Iconis’ bouncy music is upbeat and rhythmical and drives the story swiftly along. One standout among the score’s numbers, “Ain’t No Thing,” a duet about quickening romance between Annie and Lazarus—sung amid a fistfight with a crowd of murderous whores—proves to be both a sly tribute to R&B heart-burners and a really fetching tune on its own.
The production is neatly and fleetly staged by director-choreographer Jennifer Werner, who makes smart use of colorful projected images and flashy lighting to intensify the enjoyable two-hour proceedings. The theater’s center and side aisles are populated at times by the actors, who capably lunge and parry through their athletic kung-fu choreography. A youthful six-member ensemble sharply depicts a brace of minor characters with pizzazz as they backstop a sterling trio of principals.
Brad Oscar is wickedly droll as the villain. Handsomely embodying badass Lazarus as the coolest dude evah, Alan H. Green pours a silky baritone voice into his songs. Typically winsome and then some, Annie Golden inimitably and (of course) adorably imbues Annie with a typically kooky charisma and a sweet voice that becomes this ditzy character of a certain age she was born to play.
