APE IS ENOUGH
‘Kong’ looks mighty, but show slips on banana peel
Stare hard into the gorgeous eyes of that gigantic gorilla, people: they’re deep emotional pools, transfixing in their moist, needy intensity. If they gave out Tony Awards for peepers on puppets, King Kong would already be monkeying with his acceptance speech.
But a great popular musical needs more than the Big Daddy of all puppets to deliver a hit show. And the best way to sum up everything wrong with “King Kong,” which opened Thursday night at the Broadway Theatre with a thud surely audible on Staten Island, would be that the production created a star worthy of the biggest marquee in Midtown, but not credible or complex characters with whom he can meaningfully interact once he is winched down from the heavens.
King Kong doesn’t sing — although his roar is a live and ear-piercing effect — which is just as well, given a score from Marius de Vries that confuses what you need for background music in an action movie with a musical suite for Broadway. The show has a “score” by de Vries and then “songs” by Eddie Perfect, when it needed of course, a musical underpinning as cohesive as it was exciting. It didn’t get one.
The key to this long-in-gestation musical — like all musicals, even ones costing $30 million — lay in the potential connections and relationships. And, frankly, it’s “King Kong,” for goodness sake, so a better sense of humor would not have gone amiss in Drew McOnie’s production. Strange to find that missing in a show from Australia.
Still, fairness requires giving it up for an animated beast so spectacular it makes Julie Taymor’s artier creations look like measly marionettes. King Kong, 20 feet tall and 2,000 pounds, is a whole new level of achievement. He’s controlled by a joystick and computers, but also hand-manipulated by 10 on-stage puppeteers, all scurrying around under his body and shifting his limbs. They are what convey his palpably rich heart.
And if you don’t get a rush from watching King Kong running through the digital streets of retro Manhattan and then ascending the Empire State Building, carrying Christiani Pitts’ Ann Darrow in his paws, then you have neither a pulse nor the right to be hanging out in New York City. Those sequences are fantastic; they’re just not enough.
Jack Thorne’s book has the tricky task of combining the original story from the 1933 movie — a maverick movie director named Carl Denham (Eric William Morris) finds King Kong on an expedition to Skull Island, only to decide that there is cash to be made from bringing the captured beast back to Manhattan.
Part sentimental, part exploitational, that film made famous use of the ingenue Fay Wray as a damsel in distress, three words that just don’t fly today. Thus Thorne has switched out Wray’s screams of fear for a proto-feminist roar and given the heroine internal conflict — Ann is a hungry Peggy Sawyer-type arriving on 42nd St. to make her fortune, only to spend the show worrying that she selfishly is selling out her ape pal for her own career.
Ann as Gotham City’s Jane Goodall could have worked if there was better character development and if you actually believed the relationship between her and King Kong. But while he does his best to give it up (those eyes! those eyes!), she’s emotionally unavailable and preoccupied with the show’s frenetic choreography, also by McOnie, who needed to spend less time on racing narrative and more on human intimacy. As simple as it is, the triangular story races along at such a pace, it runs away from what matters most in a musical. All kinds of opportunities are missed for tender moments.
Even the eventual demise of King Kong — assaulted with weapons on the top of the Empire State — doesn’t land with veracity. All of these puppeteers bust a collective gut making us believe in the reality of him, only for the designer, Peter England, to fill the theater with ridiculous lasers, as if this were a video game with no rules.
What a waste: If only all of “King Kong” had better believed in the truth of its own throbbing, pulsing, thoroughly fabulous puppet.