Woody Allen adapts Bullets Over Broadway for a new Broadway musical

Woody Allen’s 1994 film “Bul­lets Over Broad­way” explored the trav­ails of an aspir­ing play­wright strug­gling to bring his cre­ation to the Great White Way. And now, in a pos­sible case of art imit­at­ing, um, art, Allen is work­ing on a musical adapt­a­tion of the film, with a Broad­way première tent­at­ively slated for 2013, repor­ted Reu­ters.

Allen will write the book for the musical, which will fea­ture exist­ing music from 1920s, in which “Bul­lets Over Broad­way” is set, said pro­du­cers Julian Schlossberg and Letty Aronson.

The ori­ginal film, which starred John Cus­ack, Dianne Wiest, Chazz Pal­min­teri and Jen­nifer Tilly, was nom­in­ated for seven Academy Awards, and won one — in the Best Sup­port­ing Act­ress cat­egory, for Wiest’s por­trayal of alco­holic act­ress Helen Sin­clair. The “Bul­lets Over Broad­way” adapt­a­tion is the latest devel­op­ment in Allen’s decades-long rela­tion­ship with Broad­way, start­ing with 1966’s “Don’t Drink the Water,” which Allen wrote.

Other Broad­way pro­duc­tions involving Allen include 1969’s “Play It Again, Sam” and 1981’s “The Float­ing Light Bulb.” In 2011, his one-act play “Hon­ey­moon Hotel” was included in the lar­ger piece “Rel­at­ively Speak­ing,” which Schlossberg and Aron­son — Allen’s sis­ter — also produced.

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