A note for anyone unfamiliar with the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow: they died in the end. In the musical Bonnie & Clyde, they die in the beginning, too. A tableau of the couple slumped in their Ford V8 surrounded by gun-toting cops opens the show, thereby ensuring (along with the bullet-riddled set) that everything else is seen through our knowledge of their demise.
Admirers of the (non-musical) 1967 film may be surprised to find the romantic elements of the story largely unsullied. Whereas Arthur Penn’s movie was a scathing portrait, dwelling for example on Clyde’s impotence and the duo’s brutality, the show – with book by Ivan Menchell and generic, rootin’-tootin’ songs by Don Black and Frank Wildhorn – is a paean to two crazy kids who just wanted to be stars.
