Water for Elephants
Imperial Theater, New York City ★★★★
“Miracles do happen, even on Broadway,” said Jesse Green in The New York Times. The new musical adaptation of Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s best-selling 2006 novel, could have been another lazy bookto-stage adaptation cashing in on a familiar title. But this “huge and heart-filling” musical rewards its audience with a production built around “movement, eye candy, and awe.” At the height of the Great Depression, an ex–veterinary student hooks up with a struggling circus company and falls for the star performer, who happens to be married to the mercurial ringmaster. But while costars Grant Gustin and Isabelle McCalla make their characters three-dimensional, and the love story is energized by an “apt, rousing” musical score, when it’s at its best “Water for Elephants has more in common with the circus arts than it does with bythe-books Broadway.”
Director Jessica Stone “does an excellent job of juggling the varied elements,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. The show’s gymnastic and aerial feats evoke Cirque du Soleil, while the “flavorful” score “ranges across styles capably.” But “much of what made the book an appealing yarn was its pungency and grit,” and that’s been scrubbed away by this “sunsplashed” adaptation—at least until the final scenes, when the show’s creators “seem to be attempting to cram all the darkness previously elided into the frenzied finale.”
As often happens in expensive productions, “the show’s stagecraft outstrips its script by a mile,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. The circus animals are compelling humanpuppet hybrids, and though the titular elephant “doesn’t quite pack the punch she should,” the production elsewhere “contains real flashes of astonishment and grace.” The true stars of the show turn out to be the “ridiculously talented” acrobats who regularly flip and fly across our view against a lush cloudscape background. “If, like me, you are highly susceptible to sawdust and tinsel, then much of Water for Elephants will delight on the basis of spectacle alone.”