This elaborately titled musical is based on a novel of the same name by Sara Gruen which was a best seller and served as the source of a film with Reese Witherspoon and others. It’s now been produced by a consortium of individuals, theatre lovers, management firms–over fifty of them!– with Jessie Stone credited as Director. Choreography is by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll, and there is supervision and arrangements of the musical score by the Pigpen Theatre Company–which has to be a first. It features an extraordinary company of singers, dancers, actors, and essentially acrobats whose nimble bodies bend, twist, turn, and literally fly through the air to the gasps of pleasure and astonishment from all of us who sat stunned at the results. If all we were asked to do was watch the dazzling scenery and costumes whirl by, we could turn off our minds and not listen to the songs whose words and music make a frail attempt to tell us a story and to elicit some emotional connection to the characters who populate it. Then we could shout “Wow! What a dazzling musical comedy this is!” The problem here is that it’s dazzling enough…. but is it a theatre piece or is it a circus?
There is a character called Mr. Jankowski, there is a horse, a lion, an orangutan and an endearing elephant–all possessed with personality. But I regret to say I would need at least one more viewing of this gorgeous show before attempting to tell you its story. Is there a story to a spectacle? To a circus? If there is, I need help in deciphering it. I can say that Grant Guskin, Isabelle McCalla, Gregg Edelman, Sara Gettelfinger, Paul Alexander Nolan, Stan Brown and all the others manage without benefit of a cohesive book to make us enjoy it even though I still felt like an outsider looking in at the end.
The book by Rick Ellis throws in a line here and a short scene there to lure us back to the story, but all it did was make us wait for the magic of the spectacle to return. I admit my view of the show is not the popular one; the end of show babble as we left the theatre seemed favorable as we hit the street. We’ll have to wait to see if the show has legs. If it does, I apologize to those of you who embrace it. Mr. Ellis spent seventeen years (from 1982 to1999) as Creative Director of ad campaigns for more than three hundred Broadway shows.Then he joined the Disney Company as Creative Consultant and was helpful in setting sales records for so much of that studio’s product. Clearly he was first rate at capturing the essence of a film’s appeal. His challenge will be to attract a vast audience to this musical in a Broadway market.