Not going to post full reviews of these, just a few thoughts --
The chief one is how similar the shows are. Both are about young would-be playwrights from the world of tenements and deprivation. Both introduce their playwrights to eccentrics who become their collaborators. Both involve the revision of scripts the first drafts of which the young writers have written. And, in both, I think, the audience doesn't give enough of a damn about the projects in question to care about whether the problems are licked or not.
One of the things that keeps Bullets (adapted by Woody Allen from a movie he co-wrote and directed) from working for me is that the young writer, David Shayne, seems to have no larger desire than to be a successful playwright. This is no Clifford Odets, on fire to share his vision of an unfair world. What little we see of the play he has written makes it look like a thin star vehicle set in a drawing room. I might care about a guy with a passion to fight injustice through drama, but a guy who -- like so many others -- just wants celebrity? Also, if his gangster collaborator has a more artistic sensibility, what is it in service to? A better grade of garbage? Heroes are people who pursue admirable goals. Shayne's goal doesn't make me care about him. In fact, his goal to be a famous writer (as opposed to a really good writer) marks him as something of a jerk who deserves the grief he gets.
Act One's young playwright, Moss Hart, does care about being good. He also cares about rescuing his family from the humiliation of the poverty that has hobbled their lives. Good, playable goals, and I am on Moss's side from the start. The best material in the show involves the world he is trying to escape and his relationship with an eccentric aunt whose passion for the theatre akin to a religion. Played by Andrea Martin, she is the figure who helps guide young Moss to a future she will not have the satisfaction of seeing him attain. Moss's big chance to escape arrives in the interest a producer takes in a comedy he has written called Once in a Lifetime and the willingness Broadway legend George S. Kaufman shows in collaborating with the neophyte in bringing the play up to scratch for Broadway. Much of the second act of James Lapine's adaptation of Moss Hart's best-selling memoir involves trying to fix the play. But in order for us to appreciate the fixes, we have to a) know the play sufficiently for the changes put in to mean something and b) believe in the play's promise. Unlike Kaufman and Hart's later collaborations, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take it With You, which continue to be revived successfully, Once in a Lifetime doesn't hold up terribly well and hasn't had a major revival in years. (The stacks are filled with scripts that were hits in their time and are unpersuasive today.) As a result, I found the struggle to make it work less than urgent urgent. It's like watching two guys labor valiantly in the effort to write the jingle for a toothpaste commercial.
Both of these shows have been created by teams much of whose other work I've admired. Well, everyone stumbles.
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