Annie Golden, beloved by musical theater nerds for her work in shows including “Assassins” and “The Full Monty,” keeps her classic rock belt under wraps in a woebegone vibe, as if Lillian Gish ate Tina Turner. When she lets it out, it’s doubly exciting for the fact of her voice and the surprise of it.
But at 67, having first broken through with the movie of “Hair” in 1979, she doesn’t get as many opportunities as she should. Though she continues to work on television — she was the nearly mute Norma Romano on “Orange Is the New Black” — the theater has not been as dependable for her. Her last major New York stage appearance was in the 2014 revival of “Violet.”
Enter “Broadway Bounty Hunter,” a new musical designed to showcase her talents by celebrating her (in the words of its opening number) as a “Woman of a Certain Age.”
That seems a worthy thing to do, and Ms. Golden, playing a fictional character named Annie with a nearly identical résumé, makes the most of it. I just wish the authors — the music is by Joe Iconis, the book and lyrics by Mr. Iconis, Lance Rubin and Jason SweetTooth Williams — had something else, anything else, as worthy in mind.
They claim they do. In a preface to the script, they write that the show is a homage to B movies of the 1970s and ’80s and an opportunity to foreground the talents of black and Asian performers who were often the heroes of those films.
Fair enough, and if you enjoy the genres they say they are drawing on — “Blaxploitation, Martial Arts, Chopsocky, Carsploitation and Revenge” — perhaps you will enjoy this.
But “Broadway Bounty Hunter,” which opened at the Greenwich House Theater on Tuesday evening, lands uncomfortably in the gap between tribute and spoof. Like the disco-era takeoff “Disaster!” — which unaccountably made it to Broadway in 2016 — it is neither very loving nor very funny, unless it is loving and funny to make all the same mistakes that made the B movies B in the first place.
Those mistakes begin with a plot that seems to have been hammered together from pieces of incompatible jigsaw puzzles. Ms. Golden’s character, sick of being humiliated at auditions, is recruited by Shiro Jin (Emily Borromeo), the founder of a bounty hunting firm, to help solve a case with Broadway connections. It seems that the expatriate drug lord Mac Roundtree (Brad Oscar) is somehow implicated in the death of Jin’s twin brother, a former chorus boy; Jin wants Roundtree brought back from Ecuador to face justice.
So after Annie, wearing an “Assassins” sweatshirt, gets trained in martial arts, she goes on the road with the Shaft-like, alpha-male bounty hunter Lazarus (Alan H. Green).
And that’s about all I can bear to relate, except to say that when Annie arrives at an Ecuadorean brothel run by Roundtree, she tries to unionize the prostitutes. “Everyone deserves their two-hour dinner break between performances,” she says, as if Equity had expanded to sex work.
That’s actually one of the show’s funnier lines; the script is at its best twitting Broadway and its byways. When the hotheaded Lazarus tears into Annie for mailing Roundtree’s dossier to a casting director instead of her headshot, she retorts, “I feel like I’m working with Mandy Patinkin again.”
But even as light comedy, “Broadway Bounty Hunter” is sorely lacking in the core pleasures of storytelling, such as character development, emotional engagement and credible stakes. Rather, the production, under Jennifer Werner’s direction, seems to embrace amateurishness as an aesthetic. It’s the kind of show that proudly attempts to mine humor from feigned incompetence, as if poor construction were a virtue.
The songs, at least, clear that low bar. As he demonstrated in “Be More Chill,” Mr. Iconis has a talent for sharp pop hooks. But also as in “Be More Chill,” the amplification here is so assaultive that the music comes off as something to endure instead of enjoy.
That’s a shame because even if they are sometimes trifling or outré (Ms. Golden’s big number is weirdly called “Veins”), the songs are fabulously sung by the nine-person cast, who simultaneously perform choreography (also by Ms. Werner) that resembles a cross between Jazzercise and Krav Maga.
To me, the real mystery is why authors clearly capable of aiming higher settled on this — and kept at it. (The show had its premiere at Barrington Stage Company in 2016.)
But theater, even if it’s not yet Equity-covered prostitution, is as cruel to young writers as it is to women of a certain age. The authors needed a chance to fail, and Ms. Golden needed a chance to shine. Though “Broadway Bounty Hunter” is a success on both counts, it mostly makes you want to see everyone involved get involved in something better.
Broadway Bounty Hunter
Tickets Through Sept. 15 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; broadwaybountyhunter.com. Running time: 2 hours.
Broadway Bounty Hunter
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Jesse Green is the co-chief theater critic. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was the theater critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor. He is the author of a novel, “O Beautiful,” and a memoir, “The Velveteen Father.” @JesseKGreen • Facebook
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