By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day,a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Forty-moment Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the original 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, or ” a high-spirited story of gangsters,showgirls, and theatre, and set in Manhattan in 1929,just before the crash. (The show opens at the St. James, on West Forty-fourth Street, and 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, or 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 expend clay, or 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, and theres no nervousness. It’s just art pouring out of you. But now you fill the responsibility of passing that on to the actors and also protecting them and being there for them. So there’s an additional energy.”
Source: newyorker.com