When you’re a woman of a certain age (no need to specify that age, but it’s generally over 40) you never expect to hear a hook-filled song called “Woman of a Certain Age” kicking off and wrapping up a show—let alone see an entire musical that celebrates such a woman and gives her a meaty role that any actress would break a couple kneecaps for. But that’s the brilliant notion behind Broadway Bounty Hunter, the new musical from millennial magnet composer Joe Iconis (Be More Chill), which stars Annie Golden of Hair, Assassins, and The Full Monty fame as the badass title character.
Golden plays an actress named Annie Golden who starred in Hair, Assassins, and The Full Monty but now can’t scrape together enough cash to pay the electric bill. (Apparently this Annie Golden didn’t spend six seasons on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.) The commanding, and very chic, Shiro Jin (Emily Borromeo), who runs “the only female-run bounty-hunting agency in the city”—there are others?—recruits her, so off Golden goes to learn to box, break bricks, and tap into her “primal rage.” Naturally, she wears her Assassins hoodie.
Is it a bonkers premise? Absolutely. Then again, so is the MTA sign on the projection-filled set: “We’re working hard to make sure you’re on time.” As is the idea that Annie and her bounty-hunting partner, the named-with-intention Lazarus (Alan H. Green), are driving from New York to Ecuador. While listening to Xanadu. (Lazarus, it turns out, is not a fan: “And I told you the whole time to turn that shit off, cuz everybody know, disco breaks my concentration.”)
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
Did you catch that reference to another of Golden’s shows? Theater fans will lap up all the way-inside jokes, such as Annie’s declaration that “It’s the day of the show, y’all!” She muses that she’d “love to play Mame, but people always think of me as a Gooch.” (Thoughts?) And when Lazarus gets snippy with her, she snaps right back: “Calm The Fuck Down! I feel like I’m working with Mandy Patinkin again.”
It’s when Annie and Lazarus track down their target, drug dealer/pimp/theater producer Mac Roundtree (two-time Tony nominee Brad Oscar, whose big number consists mostly of repeating the phrase “I’m back, bitch”), in his den of iniquity that Broadway Bounty Hunter starts to go off the rails. Surely the fight scenes with the hookers—sorry, “climax coaches”—and with Roundtree’s hopped-up chorus line are supposed to have a B-movie slapdash quality, but they just look confusing and sloppy. And while including an intermission allows the creators to work in a major, though obvious, cliffhanger, nixing the interval—plus a few judicious nips and tucks—couldn’t hurt. Apologies to the terrific Green, but Lazarus’ “Feelings” song feels like it lasts as long as the drive to Ecuador. (Which is 5,743 miles, for the curious.)
Through it all, Golden is a gem. (Thought I was going to say golden, didn’t you?) Whether belting the nostalgic “Spin Those Records”—“Oh, my voice would kill in any key/ Never had to take the harmony”—or grooving with Green on the honey-sweet “Ain’t No Thing,” she proves a potent presence and a vocal powerhouse. Incidentally, at Saturday matinees, in place of Golden, Anne L. Nathan stars as an actress named Anne L. Nathan. The idea, according to authors Iconis, Lance Rubin, Jason Sweettooth Williams (the three cowrote the libretto), is that future productions will be tailored to their own women of a certain age. To borrow from Annie’s fellow bounty hunter Felipe (Jared Joseph), that’s progressive as fuck.
Broadway Bounty Hunter opened July 23, 2019, at the Greenwich House Theater and runs through August 18. Tickets and information: broadwaybountyhunter.com
