Review: ‘Water for Elephants’ elevates the Elephant in the Room – The Village Voice

No animals are harmed in the Broadway production of Water for Elephants; in fact, no live animals appear onstage at all, except for the two-legged homo sapiens, one of whom is a real monster. An assortment of excellent puppets, ranging from a doggie carried by clown Joe De Paul to the titular elephant, Rosie, are the work of Ray Wetmore & Jr Goodman and Camille Labarre. Some are self-propelled and others require large, well-coordinated teams to get them moving. But what makes this show exceptional is the population of “kinkers and rousts,” the gang of acrobats, tumblers, and aerial specialists who keep every scene in motion. 

For all the nonstop activity, which is one of the show’s strengths, there’s a sense of placelessness. The year is 1931. One town is just like another, full of rubes who’ll hand over their money for mindless entertainment, a chance to forget their troubles for a couple of hours.  The action takes place on the outskirts, as the tent goes up, comes down, and gets loaded onto the train, with everything and everybody else, for the trip to the next town. 

Rick Elice’s script, condensed from Sara Gruen’s very popular 2006 novel and nodding to the 2011 film, effectively uses flashbacks to allow senior citizen Jacob Jankowski (Broadway vet Gregg Edelman) to take his time backstage at a contemporary circus to share the story of his life. He begins at the moment in 1931 when, in his last semester of veterinary school, he is devastated by the sudden death of his parents, continuing until as an elderly retiree, he runs away with the circus for a second time. The action heats up when Jacob’s grieving younger self (Grant Gustin) hops a train out of town that turns out to be carrying a struggling circus and is immediately ordered, by a group of singing roustabouts, to get off. 

This is not the glossy French crew of Cirque du Soleil. It’s down in the dust of Depression middle America, and people put up with the boss’s brutality because they desperately need their jobs. 

An African American man swigging from a flask (Stan Brown, making his Broadway debut at 61 in a standout performance as a roustabout named Camel) is the only one who’s a little bit kind to Jacob, offering him a couple of meals and a mat to sleep on in exchange for a day’s work during the show’s stint in Utica, New York. “You didn’t jump just any old train, son. This here’s the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth! Welcome to the circus!! … Let’s get you started. See that shovel? See that shit? Get to it.”

But ringmaster August Rachinger (Paul Alexander Nolan), who owns the struggling show, has a violent streak, wielding a whip and abusing everybody and everything in his path. He immediately senses in the greenhorn Jacob competition for the affections of his wife, Marlena (Isabelle McCalla), the show’s equestrienne star. 

Jessica Stone, also responsible for Kimberly Akimbo (running just down the block), directs with a gentle hand. The music and lyrics, credited to PigPen Theatre Co., are largely forgettable, mostly manifesting as what my date, a seasoned circus artist, called “folk-recitative” — musicalized dialog as opposed to snappy songs. Many of the rhymes feel awkward and forced, as when the show’s aging glamour girl (Sara Gettelfinger) describes the young swain: “Young fellers always wear their parts on their sleeve.” The period is Cole Porter, but the ambiance is funky/bluegrass. After a while I stopped trying to make out the words. 

But there’s a sweetness to the whole undertaking that’s reminiscent of another contemporary musical, Come from Away, which shares Water’s most endearing quality: It’s centered on a community of workers, and we watch them do their jobs. In Come from Away, the community is a Newfoundland airport swamped by grounded planes after 9/11. Here, it’s a broke circus in the depths of the Depression, and the people onstage are always working, even when they’re ostensibly resting — they’re juggling (with knives, OMG), jumping rope, pounding spikes into the ground with sledgehammers, doing flips and three-highs, playing poker, and swinging one another about with abandon. 

This is not the glossy French crew of Cirque du Soleil. It’s down in the dust of Depression middle America, and people put up with the boss’s brutality because they desperately need their jobs. A horse with a badly injured hoof (played with glorious shyness by Antoine Boissereau) is dispatched humanely, ascends to “heaven,” then drops precipitously, all through the magic of aerial silks. Boissereau is a member of The 7 Fingers, a Montreal artist collective that tells “human stories with superhuman skills,” and several other members share the stage here. Their artistic director, Shana Carroll, is credited as Water’s circus designer and co-choreographer, alongside Jesse Robb. 

Takeshi Kata’s airy set design exploits the fact that there are barely any conventional interiors in this circus tale, which unfolds mostly in train cars and tents and open fields. The trains themselves are simple structures, scaffolding on wheels, nothing fancy. All the focus is on the performers and the story. Bradley King’s lighting, mostly illuminating fabulous big skies and stars, is practically another character. Rosie the elephant, whose gray skin has a cubist structure and who requires five people to get her going, turns out to understand Polish, the native language of Jacob. And when disaster strikes, it claims the right victim.

Water for Elephants is a musical, but it’s not exactly a comedy. It grapples with adult themes —  violence, adultery, alcoholism, death. Nevertheless, you could bring the kids; the spectacle is edifying and real, not prerecorded, and authentically embedded in its circus surround. The show creates a natural opening to begin conversations about heavy stuff, especially poverty and mental illness.  

I will not spoil the story’s ending, except to say that for all the darkness — and there is plenty of stomach-churning viciousness — the show emerges into happily ever after. And my hunch is that Water for Elephants will do that too, becoming another Broadway perennial with jobs for lots of highly trained movers, creating a destination for young aspirants to a life in theater, and for their elders who still treasure the ride.  ❖

Water for Elephants
Imperial Theater
249 West 45th Street

Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.