American Psycho
Opening Night: April 21, 2016
Closing: June 5, 2016
Theater: Schoenfeld Theatre
Patrick Bateman takes the stage in this thrilling new musical based on the cult classic film.
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April 21, 2016
Though it is spattered with stage blood from beginning to end and features the sort of carnage associated with Eli Roth movies, “American Psycho” turns out to be one of those musicals that send your thoughts awandering, even as you watch them. So while this show’s title character (played by Benjamin Walker in an admirably disciplined performance) takes a gleaming ax or chain saw to his co-stars, you may find yourself fixating on the following questions: Collectively, how many hours of gym time per week does the incredibly buff cast embody? More than that of the acrobats of Cirque du Soleil, whose “Paramour” opens on Broadway next month? Did those auditioning for “American Psycho” have to submit ab shots instead of head shots? And before they set foot onstage each night, are they required to pass a body mass index test? If such queries do indeed fill your head during the long and decoratively gory duration of “American Psycho,” which opened on Thursday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, then it could be argued that the show’s creators have done their job. This is even more true if envy gnaws at your bowels at the sight of all those hardbodies (to use one of the script’s favorite words) prancing and posing before you.
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April 21, 2016
With its wicked wit, catchy ear candy and sexy cast, “American Psycho” gives you a killer buzz — for a while. Euphoria sinks once corpses pile up in this glossy new Broadway musical. Based on Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial 1991 book, the story follows Patrick Bateman, a Wall Streeter and mass murderer, through the excess of ’80s New York. A white box set and video projections evoke the minimalism and garish glare of the era. Author Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”) and composer-lyricist Duncan Sheik (a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening”) are mostly faithful to the novel. But they heighten the ironic humor and lessen the graphic violence of both the book and the Christian Bale film. Sheik’s telling and irresistibly tuneful opening song lets Bateman (Benjamin Walker) reveal his soul — or rather the void where this 26-year-old’s soul would be if he had one. “You see me gliding but there’s something hiding,” he belts. His secret? “I like to dissect girls,” he later admits. Really? Or is the carnage in his head?
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April 21, 2016
Tired of all those idiotic millennials with their sappy nostalgia, trying to pass off the 1980s as something more than a spasm of shame and revulsion? Then American Psycho is the show for you, bringing the ruthlessness of a serial killer in an orgiastic bloodbath to its depiction of the decade that annihilated taste, restraint and feeling. Director Rupert Goold, composer Duncan Sheik and book writer Roberta Aguirre-Sacasa crank up the satirical volume on Bret Easton Ellis’ cult novel in a musical with design to die for and a cool, period-appropriate electro-pop score. And as Patrick Bateman, the chiseled Benjamin Walker takes us on a riveting journey of existential ennui that bleeds into violence before bottoming out in anguish. Is it a first-rate musical? Not quite. The songs of narcissism, label-whoring, contemptuous greed and status-seeking one-upmanship are just as often lists as mini-narratives, even if they’re fun and catchy. (Who could resist a number that rhymes “charred mahi-mahi” with “Isaac Mizrahi?”) And the more reflective turn in the second act doesn’t have quite the same seductive stiletto-blade wit as the first, which bookends its celebration of unapologetic shallowness with gory splatter kills. But the show is a very sharp, distinctly theatrical treatment of its source material, in many ways improving on Mary Harron’s movie version from 2000.
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April 21, 2016
Benjamin Walker wears clothes and almost no clothes with equal elan in “American Psycho,” the blood-spattered, label-obsessed musical that opened on Broadway tonight. Perhaps the star has a thing for blood; it was, after all, his gleefully free-form performance in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” that put him on the map. That comic-strip musical is “Barney” compared with the hematic horrors of the current enterprise. American Psycho is based on the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis and, later, the 2000 film starring Christian Bale in the title role of Patrick Bateman, a too-rich young man of the 1980s, a master of the universe with a taste for luxury goods, trendy restaurants and extreme carnage. The show opens vertically, with Walker in tighty whities emerging from a tanning booth, enumerating every action of his morning ablutions and the many accoutrements of his lavishly accessorized lifestyle, from the Alan Flusser suit to the Toshiba TV that has, of course, got picture-in-picture, the very latest in techno-gimcrackery.
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April 21, 2016
As Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” the charismatic Benjamin Walker first appears in a tanning booth, stripped to his underpants, his muscles smooth and gleaming. He looks like a doll in a box, complete with accessories: status-symbol 1980s cosmetics and clothing that he meticulously name-drops. Hollowed out by his daily drill of conspicuous consumption, Patrick turns into a serial killer, and the first act ends in a jet of blood as he gives a rival the axe—to the strains of Huey Lewis and News’s “Hip to Be Square.” (The show is part jukebox musical, or rather Walkman musical; Duncan Sheik’s pulsingly blasé synth-and-drum score is augmented by five hit pop songs from the period.) Rupert Goold’s production looks terrific; the attractive cast is the meat in Es Devlin’s set, the world’s hippest minimalist abattoir. Fans of Bret Easton Ellis’s gruesome 1991 novel, and especially of Mary Harron’s less explicit 2000 film version, will scream with delighted recognition, and there are sharp performances.
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