These Paper Bullets!
Opening Night: March 14, 2014
Closing: April 5, 2014
Theater: Yale Repertory Theatre
Meet the Quartos. Ben, Claude, Balth, and Pedro. Their fans worship them. Scotland Yard fears them. And their former drummer will stop at nothing to destroy them. Can these fab four from Liverpool find true love in London and cut an album in seven nights? These Paper Bullets! is a modish ripoff of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing with a serious backbeat. Adapted by Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award nominated writer Rolin Jones (Friday Night Lights, Weeds) and featuring new songs by Grammy Award winning Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who wrote the Tony Award winning musical American Idiot, These Paper Bullets! is directed by Jackson Gay, who staged Jones’s The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow at Yale Rep in 2004.
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March 27, 2014
NEW HAVEN — All the mod markers have been spruced up and put in place in the freely swinging Shakespeare-inspired romp These Paper Bullets! at Yale Repertory Theater here. Cheekily described as “a modish ripoff” of Much Ado About Nothing, the production evokes with tangy authority the sights, sounds and styles of London rumbling through the youthquake years. The Vidal Sassoon bobs are spot on; the bowl cuts for the boys raise a smile; A-line miniskirts expose milky thighs above go-go boots snugly hugging calves. The strumming guitars and tight harmonies are provided by Billie Joe Armstrong, the frontman of Green Day, whose American Idiot was seen on Broadway. Mr. Armstrong has written a small but select group of pop nuggets for the show, performed with amiable gusto by the actors, that ably mimic the head-wagging early Beatles hits. Rolin Jones’s adaptation transforms Shakespeare’s soldiers returning from battle into a swoon-inducing rock band coming off a world tour: the Quartos, they are called. (Get it?)
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