Theater Review A Dad’s Tall Tales and a Down-to-Earth Son Susan Stroman Directs ‘Big Fish’ on Broadway By BEN BRANTLEY Published: October 6, 2013 For a show that celebrates tall tales, “Big Fish” feels curiously stunted. Granted, this movie-inspired musical about a whopper-spinning traveling salesman, which opened on Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theater, is certainly big by most conventional measurements. It has a big cast, a big orchestra, a host of hyperventilating big production numbers and a cornucopia of wild-and-crazy centerpieces, with really big special effects. It is also endowed with big talents, including the director and choreographer Susan Stroman (“Contact,” “The Producers”) and the actor Norbert Leo Butz (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), who tend to attract Tony Award nominations the way cashmere draws moths. Add to this the considerable gifts of the fast-rising Broadway star Bobby Steggert and the endlessly resourceful set designer Julian Crouch, and you would seem to have the makings of a musical giant. Yet “Big Fish,” which has been carefully designed to grow on you as it piles up its excesses, perversely starts shrinking almost from the beginning. While this process might baffle endocrinologists, lovers of liars of all stripes will understand what’s gone wrong. For outlandish stories to seduce, you should never be able to separate the teller from the tale. “Big Fish” fails to forge the crucial connection between its characters and their fantasies. Featuring songs by Andrew Lippa and a book by John August, this musical is about one of those impossible, wonderful, embarrassing fathers whose ghosts have done so much to keep psychiatrists in business. Based on Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel and the 2003 film by Tim Burton (with a screenplay by Mr. August), this is a story that presents father as fantasist, and its tone brings to mind best-selling sentimental filial memoirs — à la Tim Russert and Geoffrey Wolff — crossed with “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” The dad of “Big Fish” is Edward Bloom, and he is played by the wonderful but, in this case, stymied Mr. Butz. (By the way, if you think there might be a pun waiting to explode in Edward’s last name, you’re already ahead of the game.) Edward is a life-of-the-party Alabama boy still twinkling in the twilight of his life, which (this is not a spoiler) is destined to end soon. Age cannot stale his enthusiasm for retelling the same improbable accounts of his youth or his hunger for the spotlight. Such egocentricity particularly vexes Will (Mr. Steggert) — the only child of Edward and the doting Sandra (Kate Baldwin) — on the eve of his wedding. What if Edward somehow manages to make the event all about Edward, as per usual, further damaging an already strained father-son relationship? Will’s fiancée (and later wife), Josephine (Krystal Joy Brown), and mother do their best to make the boys make nice, for all the usual reasons found in self-help books. (You have so little time on this planet; you can’t understand yourself until you understand what you come from; etc.) But reconciliation isn’t easy when figures from Edward’s shaggy-dog past keep coming to life and hijacking the stage like the tireless playthings from “Toy Story.” You will meet these fantastical creatures long before Edward has the chance to tell you about them. A witch, a mermaid, a giant, circus performers and garden-variety pirouetting small-town citizens so popular in musicals past — all these materialize in the show’s prologue, rather as the acrobatic corps de ballet does in Diane Paulus’s current revival of “Pippin.” They, too, exude the implicit promise that they’ve “got magic to do.” And magic there is, or at least a whole lot of spectacular eye candy: scary forests with dancing trees, circus tents in which time stands still when boy meets girl, a Wild West nightmare, wallpaper that turns into a fish-filled river, an ever-expanding field of daffodils and, oh yeah, the piscine marvel of the title. (In addition to sets by Mr. Crouch, the wizard behind the look of the great Grand Guignol “Shockheaded Peter,” the show has top-of-the-line lighting by Donald Holder, costumes by the tireless William Ivey Long and fluid projections by Benjamin Pearcy for 59 Productions.) The problem is that you feel these colorful visions are being thrust not just upon the audience but also upon Edward. It’s as if the contents of an immense toy chest had been emptied on top of him, when you need to believe that it’s his imagination that summons these gaudy phantoms into existence. Yes, there’s plenty of theatrical cleverness in how these ingredients are arranged. But it’s as if some cosmic Florenz Ziegfeld is the one doing the arranging, not an Everyman Walter Mitty from Dixie. Don’t blame Mr. Butz, who is as good as anyone around at building complete characters in musicals. Playing Edward at various ages (in Mr. Burton’s movie Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney divided the role), Mr. Butz is forced to coast on his charm, while scenery happens around him, bringing to mind an affable Disney World guide who has discovered he is not the main attraction. He’s a fine instinctive, athletic dancer, in the tradition of James Cagney, and I felt a real, rare frisson whenever Edward was allowed to cut loose physically to enact his fables of derring-do. But the songs by Mr. Lippa (“The Addams Family”) don’t give Mr. Butz much to work with vocally or emotionally. A combination of country-and-western strings and Broadway brass, their melodies evoke cowboy-TV-show theme music of the early 1960s, with lyrics by Hallmark. Mr. Steggert’s singing exudes a radiant sincerity that transcends corn, and Ms. Baldwin brings a good-old-girl grit to the woman who stands by her man, no matter what. The cast also includes Brad Oscar as a werewolf circus manager, and the appealing Zachary Unger as Young Will, who was evidently just as much a humorless prig as a child as he is as a grown-up. (Anthony Pierini plays the role in the Wednesday and Saturday matinees.) I’d say that Will exists basically to be a straight man to Edward, except that everyone here — including Edward — turns out to be a straight man to Ms. Stroman’s production. As she demonstrated in “The Producers,” she is fluent in all styles of theatrical dance, and in “Contact” she showed a lovely gift for finding character through choreography. Here, though, she seems to be drawing almost randomly from her bottomless bag of tricks. Yes, her use of dancers to embody an enchanted forest and a campfire is delightful. And it’s hard not to chuckle when those two-stepping elephants make a cameo appearance. But if the show is all about the need for personal myths, it has to let its leading mythmaker take charge. Not once did I feel that what I was seeing had been spawned by the teeming mind of Edward Bloom. The show’s de facto theme song may advocate “be the hero” of your own life, but somehow “Big Fish” turns everyone into a local-color extra. Big Fish Book by John August; music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; based on the novel “Big Fish” by Daniel Wallace and the Columbia Pictures film screenplay by Mr. August; directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman; music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell; orchestrations by Larry Hochman; sets by Julian Crouch; costumes by William Ivey Long; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Jon Weston; projections by Benjamin Pearcy for 59 Productions; wig and hair design by Paul Huntley; makeup design by Angelina Avallone; dance music arrangements by Sam Davis; music coordinator, Michael Keller; vocal arrangements and incidental music by Mr. Lippa; associate director, Jeff Whiting; associate choreographer, Chris Peterson; production manager, Aurora Productions; production supervisor, Joshua Halperin; company manager, David van Zyll de Jong; general manager, 101 Productions. Presented by Dan Jinks, Bruce Cohen, Stage Entertainment USA, Roy Furman, Edward Walson, James L. Nederlander, Broadway Across America/Rich Entertainment Group and John Domo, in association with Parrothead Productions, Lucky Fish, Peter May/Jim Fantaci, Harvey Weinstein/Carole L. Haber, Dancing Elephant Productions, C J E&M, Ted Liebowitz, Ted Hartley, Clay Floren and Columbia Pictures. At the Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street, Manhattan; (866) 870-2717, bigfishthemusical. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. WITH: Norbert Leo Butz (Edward Bloom), Kate Baldwin (Sandra Bloom), Bobby Steggert (Will Bloom), Krystal Joy Brown (Josephine Bloom), Anthony Pierini and Zachary Unger (alternating Young Will), Ryan Andes (Karl), Ben Crawford (Don Price) and Brad Oscar (Amos Calloway).
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 05:27:01 +0000
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