Benjamin Walker has been trying to break through to stardom and is having a bloody hard time of it. The 33-year-old actor came to the fore in the title role of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” — the 2011 Broadway musical satire about the president whose place on the $20 bill is now imperiled — and then starred in the film flop “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.”Now the carnage is much sleeker, label-conscious, and contemporary: Walker has been cast as the homicidal but impeccably dressed Patrick Bateman, a stockbroker who epitomizes the soulless ’80s, in the new Broadway musical “American Psycho,” based on Brett Easton Ellis’s 1992 nihilistic novel. The thriller, directed by Rupert Goold and written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Duncan Sheik, comes to New York next spring after a 2013 London production that received mixed notices but drew sell-out business, largely on the name of its star, Matt Smith (“Dr. Who”). Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times of the Almeida Theatre production, felt that the “limply abstracted bloodletting” — at one point Bateman waits for a date with a nail gun in his lap — came off as “watery” compared to the blood-soaked mayhem of the movie, starring Christian Bale, which was released in 2000. But he praised Sheik’s score and some of Goold’s high-concept stylization, aided by choreographer Lynne Page (“La Cage Aux Folles”).“Where the show soars is in its pastiche production numbers, which wittily evoke 1980s MTV videos,” wrote Brantley, adding that the musical “wallows happily in orgasmic electronic chords and affectless echo-chamber vocals.”In a press statement announcing Walker’s casting, Goold said, “I’ve been a huge fan of Ben’s work on stage and screen and am looking forward to working with him on ‘American Psycho.’ He is an enormous talent and I think audiences will be utterly seduced by his dangerous charisma and extraordinary stage presence. He’ll make a killer Patrick Bateman.”The musical was scheduled to play off-Broadway’s Second Stage this year as part of its developmental process. But when commercial producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel came aboard the decision was made to skip that engagement and move directly to Broadway. Georgia-born and Juilliard-trained, Walker made his Broadway debut in 2007 in a revival of “Inherit the Wind,” which he followed up in the role of the unschooled lover of the scheming marquise in the Roundabout revival of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” His last Broadway outing was as Brick opposite Scarlett Johansson’s Maggie in the 2013 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Just before “American Psycho” bows on Broadway, Walker will be seen in the Ron Howard movie “In the Heart of the Sea,” as the captain of a ship that is menaced and destroyed by a sperm whale, leaving the crew adrift for 90 days thousands of miles from land. Chris Hemsworth co-stars as first officer Owen Chase on the ill-fated voyage, which ends in cannibalism. Sounds like Patrick Bateman’s sort of movie.
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