This spring, Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway gets the stage treatment with seasoned Broadway director/choreographer Susan Stroman—on Broadway, no less, at the St. James Theater. Downtown at the Public, previews are on for the Steven Soderbergh-directed The Library, written by his frequent and gifted collaborator, Scott Z. Burns. Bullets, playing uptown, is very old New York: a 1930’s musical with gangsters and a femme fatale, showing in a theater whose storied history includes Gilbert and Sullivan plays, Hamlet, Oklahoma, and Peter Pan, written by one of the most famous New Yorkers with an equally storied stage history. The Library is new New York: a play with echoes of the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings, showing in the late Mr. Papp’s über-downtown black box, written and directed by artists whose collaborations include The Informant and Contagion. My delight in knowing that two of my favorite filmmakers are making work on two stages I frequented in my childhood is equalled by my enjoyment in this perfect uptown-downtown binary. And I’m sure both plays will be wonderful, too.
Leonine Films 