‘Water For Elephants’ Broadway Review: Big Top, Little Drama
deadline.comWater For Elephants, the musical opening tonight at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, is perhaps best viewed as a redemptive attempt to adapt Sara Gruen’s popular 2006 historical romance novel into something, anything, to block from memory the middling, grim 2011 film starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon.
That’s faint praise, to be sure, but credit where it’s due: Despite source material whose hold on at least some segment of the popular imagination remains inscrutable to the rest of us, the new musical is never less than diverting, with its gorgeous aerial acrobatics, solid work from director Jessica Stone (Kimberly Akimbo) and a plucky pastiche of a score that hints, to my ears, at ’30s-era novelty songs, old timey banjo music, Tin Pan Alley, Black gospel, Jesus Christ Superstar-era Andrew Lloyd Webber and 21st Century stage musical pop.
Like that other romance-novel-turned-musical playing just down the block, Water For Elephants, as with The Notebook, has few surprises in store even for those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie.
Both musicals feature fairly predictable love stories, flashback structures (down to the near-identical old-man narrators) and wistful melancholy moods that are rarely broken.
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