These Paper Bullets! NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (73)
See it if you like musical songs written into the dialogue.
Don't see it if don;t like the Beatles or Beatles themed plays.
See it if I saw a preview, perhaps it improved. But I found it flat and draggy.
Don't see it if You loved American Idiot and expect that level of music and intensity.
See it if You're only a fan of Shakespeare when it's completely deconstructed. And if you like to see a good old fashioned raunchy slapstick
Don't see it if You consider yourself a Shakespeare fan or if you like to keep your comedy above the Noel-Coward line
See it if it is a cross between much ado about nothing and beatlemania - if you like that combo then this is for you
Don't see it if silly antics with a dose of slapstick is not your idea of good theater
See it if You love the British invasion and don't mind a quirky, meandering play-that-wants-to-be-a-musical.
Don't see it if You are looking for a smartly-written musical.
See it if You like Shakespeare and The Beatles. A fun show that moves Much Ado to the 1960's. The wedding scene in particular is a hoot.
Don't see it if The show doesn't make its turn to the dramatic well. Felt like there should have been more music.
See it if think a show that evokes the Beatles and Shakespeare is a must see. Acting is good. Songs are better.
Don't see it if a crisp well written script is high on your list of wants. Billy Joe Armstrong would have been better suited to do a Beatlesesque album.
See it if you love Beatles-que music, the sixties, Shakespeare, cleverness, great costumes and hair, ambitious concepts. I was mostly entertained.
Don't see it if you get bored (it's too long) or you dislike stupid slapstick (I found the Scotland Yard segments painfully unappealing).
Critic Reviews (40)
“'These Paper Bullets,' a mash up of the Bard’s 'Much Ado' with a spoof of the Fab Four, is great to look at, with songs that are fabulous to listen to. So why did I find so much of it excruciating to sit through? The answer is the tone. In what felt like an almost desperate effort to entertain us, playwright Rolin Jones and director Jackson Gay too often effect a Monty Python-like silliness...You either find all this goofiness funny or you don’t. I didn’t."
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"The production itself is a clownish mishmash of juvenilia, performed with all the subtlety of the Three Stooges...Gay encourages her actors to mug mercilessly as if this were a dramatization of “Twist and Shout,” the pratfalls pile up like pancakes, girls’ panties fly like snowflakes, people wear lampshades on their heads, and Bea...does a bit with a used condom she can’t dislodge from her finger."
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"Under Jackson Gay’s uneven direction, 'These Paper Bullets' is the theatrical equivalent of the now popular 'piecaken': it puts together things that usually are served at separate sittings. And while this layer cake of Shakespeare’s 'Much Ado About Nothing,' Billy Joe Armstrong’s authentic-sounding faux-1960s tunes, and Monty Python silliness is often delicious, it can also be too much to eat at once and sometimes leave you feeling overstuffed rather than really satisfied."
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"This reviewer will admit that matching 'Much Ado' with the particulars of 'Bullets!' was fun for a while. Sometime before act one ends, however, Jones's striving too hard to follow the 'Much Ado' ins-and-outs began to take a toll. Furthermore, a few of the sequences stopped being laugh-provoking and become merely messily strained.... Shout-out to Jackson Gay, and the success she's had with a cast that consistently makes the hot parts hotter. "
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"Direction is playful and the musical numbers are a treat (though the sound mix still needs work as the vocals are often swallowed), but the evening isn’t as much fun as it ought to be...The first act in particular takes an awful long time to get going and the script hews too closely to the structure of the original when short cuts would be welcome."
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"There isn’t enough of Armstrong’s music and there’s way too much of Rolin Jones’ book, which achieves the uneasy feat of being both amateur and frenetic. Jackson Gay directs the actors to scream and gesticulate like crazy people. Only Justin Kirk as one of the Quartos manages to deliver a somewhat subdued performance despite wrestling with a stuffed bird, among other things."
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"All of it is piled on with dashes of cleverness, abetted by a cast giving its all, but the result is often way too much. Yet the effect is so zany that one can have a good time a good deal of the way and not care a hoot about what is being irreverently done to Shakespeare."
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"The biggest kudos go to director Jackson Gay who uses everything she can think of—terrific video projections of the period, some mild audience participation and a drag Queen Elizabeth—to create the show's jovial mood. Some of the antics are sophomoric and the show goes on longer than need be. But the unabashed desire by everyone involved to give the audience a good time left me with a grin on my face."
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