By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Forty-second Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the New 42nd Street Studios the mood was the opposite of frigid. It was the first day of work on a musical adaptation of Woody Allen's 1994 movie 'Bullets Over Broadway,' a high-spirited story of gangsters, showgirls, and theatre, set in Manhattan in 1929, just before the crash. (The show opens at the St. James, on West Forty-fourth Street, on April 10th.) Susan Stroman, the show's director and choreographer (Allen wrote the book), had arrived early for a ten-o'clock call and was inspecting a miniature model of the set, designed by Santo Loquasto. Two weeks before, she had taken two dance assistants to a rehearsal studio and, using them more or less the way a sculptor would use clay, had danced all the characters and 'worked out the landscape of movement and all the set changes.' 'So I absolutely know how the show moves,' she said. Nonetheless, she was feeling a kind of parental anxiety. 'When it's just me and my assistants dancing and singing in a room, there's no nervousness. It's just art pouring out of you. But now you have the responsibility of passing that on to the actors and also protecting them and being there for them. So there's an extra energy.'
A stickler for research, Stroman had prepared a twelve-page information packet for the dancers who had been called for Day 1. In the packet was a glossary of terms, including 'Greenwich Village,' 'bohemian,' 'Prohibition,' 'gangster,' and 'flappers,' along with citations for the show's visual influences. To give the cast a taste of the playground of New York in the twenties, Stroman had inserted a couple of pages from the May 23, 1929, issue of The New Yorker: 'A Conscientious Calendar of Events Worth While.' Because 'Bullets Over Broadway' is also set in Woody Allen's world, there were thumbnail explanations of references to Kant, Rousseau, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Aristotle. The handouts sat on a Formica table at the entrance to the rehearsal hall, beside a set of black script binders, fanned out flamboyantly like a royal straight flush. Chairs had been arranged in two semicircular rows around the director's table, and Stroman's show Bible-a folder, fatter than a quarterback's playbook, that held her script, her notes, her scene-by-scene breakdown of the cast's exits and entrances, the traffic plan of each musical number, and her e-mail exchanges with Allen-stood on a music stand, in front of the empty seats: the Book of Broadway, from which Stroman would soon begin to preach the gospel of good times.
Stroman, who is fifty-nine, has blond hair, a round open face, high cheekbones, and a ring-a-ding smile. 'She puts joy on the stage because it's in her nature,' Hal Prince, who hired Stroman to choreograph his brilliant 1993 revival of 'Show Boat,' said. 'She is a shiny person.' Being sensational is Stroman's business. The credo attributed to her childhood idol, Fred Astaire-'Do it big, do it right, and do it with style'-is hers, too. She has choreographed such long-running hits as 'Crazy for You,' a musical featuring the work of George and Ira Gershwin (1992; four years, 1,622 performances, and the first of five Tony Awards), and Mel Brooks's 'The Producers' (2001; six years, 2,502 performances). From 1994 to 2003, she choreographed Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens's 'A Christmas Carol' spectacular, which packed the Paramount Theatre at Madison Square Garden every year. She was also the first woman to choreograph and direct a full-length performance at New York City Ballet. An homage to silent films, 'Double Feature' (2004), two fifty-minute dances set to the music of Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson, remains among the most popular programs in the repertory. . . .
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