‘Water For Elephants’ review: Awesome acrobats can’t save this Broadway circus

nypost.com:

shuttered “Harmony” was the first, followed by “The Notebook” — this latest lacking musical features a score by PigPen Theatre Co.

and a hokey book by Rick Elice. That drippy, “and-then-this-happened” frame story is part of Sara Gruen’s novel (and the 2011 film) — just as it was in Nicholas Sparks’ “The Notebook.” But, onstage, all the drama-killer flashbacks and flash-forwards tend to turn shows about flesh-and-blood people into sleepy wax museums — even one that takes place in a sporadically-dazzling circus.This time, the fellow journeying to the past is Jacob Jankowski (Gregg Edelman), a former veterinarian who escapes his nursing home to pay O’Brien’s One-Ring Circus a visit.Two skeptical workers listen as Jacob explains how he came to tend to the animals in Benzini Brothers’ Most Spectacular Show on Earth in the 1930s.

And — here we go again — he whooshes back in time for some overripe nostalgia.Jacob’s younger self (Grant Gustin) hops the train, joins the scrappy “kinkers” and first encounters Marlena (Isabelle McCalla), a Liberty Horse rider who then sings the show’s best number, “Easy,” while an aerialist representing her injured steed (Antoine Boissereau) twirls sublimely above her head.

The song is a sumptuous marriage of music, movement and puppetry that suggests what “Water for Elephants” could have been, had it not taken so many conventional, bland paths.