Benjamin Walker is Ripped And Ripper In ‘American Psycho’

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.