Theater Review: 'Life of Pi' on Broadway – Vulture

From Lifetime of Pi, on the Schoenfeld.
Picture: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

What would you like from me: There’s a tiger onstage! An enormous, hulking, royal Bengal tiger, slouching in a lifeboat with feline insouciance and fascinated with consuming a 17-year-old for lunch. You may see no less than three puppeteers connected to the tiger always—one crouched inside its physique, as if already consumed by the beast; one other standing beside it, swaying the top like a pendulum; and a 3rd on the rear, managing the hindquarters—and a complete of eight persons are credited with its motions. On the West Finish, the tiger crew shared a supporting actor Olivier award, although I’d argue that he’s just about the star of this factor. Named Richard Parker, he makes its grand entrance early on in Lifetime of Pi to devour a goat in a zoo, one other lifelike puppet subjected to certainly one of many ugly animal deaths onstage. At my efficiency, he acquired the sort of applause that normally greets a film star deigning to do a play on Broadway. We’re right here for the tiger, people—and sure, this tiger is fairly cool. It’s a pity that he’s stranded in a narrative awash with platitudes.

We meet the tiger within the zoo, however everyone seems to be already ready for him to reappear on a lifeboat, Lifetime of Pi’s most well-known setting. The play, tailored by Lolita Chakrabarti, is after all primarily based on Yann Martel’s 2001 novel which follows the fantastical—if acquainted, owing to the success of each the e book and Ang Lee’s 2012 movie—premise of a teenage boy named Pi Patel (performed onstage by Hiran Abeysekera) who’s shipwrecked with a tiger and some different animals in the midst of the Pacific. Pi and his household intend to relocate their household zoo from Pondicherry to Canada and capsize someplace outdoors Manila. One way or the other, he makes it to Mexico. That’s not a spoiler, as a result of as a result of the story is framed, in its many variations, by an interview the place Pi describes his unbelievable expertise at sea, on this case to a naval inspector (Daisuke Tsuji) and a consultant from the Canadian embassy (Kirsten Louie). He tells them his story with a heavy emphasis on a woo-woo interpretation of religion, filled with bromides concerning the energy of storytelling. “My story will make you consider in God,” Pi publicizes to his interlocutors early on. I can’t say it did, nevertheless it did reinforce my religion in puppetry.

The sermonizing lands hardest close to the start and finish of Lifetime of Pi, the place director Max Webster lets issues get slightly slack and starry-eyed. The primary act is actually an prolonged prologue, explaining how Pi will get caught on that lifeboat, and the motion drags. You find yourself rooting for disaster to hit sooner. A lot of the time earlier than then is spent on a sequence of scenes set across the household’s zoo that heavy-handedly lay thematic groundwork. Take word when Pi’s father (Rajesh Bose) says “man is essentially the most harmful animal within the zoo,” early on, since you’re going to listen to that line twice extra earlier than the present ends.

Pi himself is a kind of good to be true super-special boy protagonists. He occurs to be desirous about three religions directly—Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity—and sees little battle between them. Abeysekera correctly makes the selection to lean into his humor wherever doable (“I’ve had a horrible journey,” he deadpans in his hospital room in Mexico) to deliver him slightly nearer to the earth, even when it nonetheless feels just like the boy floats just a few inches above the bottom always. Sathya Sridharan, equally brings wit to Pi’s worldly maternal uncle, who’s traveled in France and is chargeable for naming him “Piscine” within the first place, but in addition has to ship a few of Lifetime of Pi’s glancing descriptions of political unrest in late-’70s India. Just like the animals on the zoo, he says, the political events concerned “don’t want to love one another, they only should share.” Like lots of the sentiments in Lifetime of Pi, that’s boldly, vaguely true sufficient.

Greatest to take the play’s cue and focus much less on the folks and extra on the charismatic megafauna. Along with Richard Parker the tiger, the marquee animal stars embody a woeful zebra, an evil hyena, and a soulful orangutan named Orange Juice who’s partly puppeteered by Mahira Kakkar, who additionally play’s Pi’s mom, a doubling that prompts your sympathy for the ape and gives an early inform that Pi’s story could also be extra metaphorical than actual. The primary act comes collectively when, lastly, the storm hits, the cargo ship goes down, and Pi and among the animals find yourself on the lifeboat. There’s no signal of the tiger at first. Then Webster directs a taut sequence of animal-on-animal violence incited by the hyena—which the puppeteers delightfully consult with as “megadeath”—that leads as much as Richard Parker’s action-hero-like re-emergence onto the stage. It’s visceral and unsettling, a lot in order that the youngsters I noticed within the viewers regarded shell-shocked at intermission. (I’d nonetheless advocate taking your youngsters; being unsettled by one thing on Broadway is an important step in rising up.) The second act will get to the center of the story as Pi tries to tame the tiger and survive at sea, conjuring extra spectacles, some in the identical ugly vein and others extra serene. Tim Hatley’s scenic design cleverly finds a number of makes use of for parts of the set, in order that Pi’s mattress in his hospital turns into a part of the lifeboat and the frames of umbrellas that makes use of to attempt to seize rain reappear as constellations held by members of the ensemble. At one level, Pi jumps by means of the stage into the water, and at one other, meets a sea turtle that strikes in some primal means that reads as clever. This being a survival story, Pi additionally has to kill the turtle. In that loss of life, as in lots of the others, the puppeteer detaches from the animal because it’s killed, the human slipping offstage like a soul leaving a physique. There’s extra heft in that gesture than in any of Pi’s extra self-conscious moralizing.

By the top of the play, Lifetime of Pi wraps again round to its huge classes, making landfall once more within the land of the obscure and apparent. What sticks extra clearly, nonetheless, are the manufacturing’s smaller gestures like that turtle’s loss of life: The way in which its creatures set off your empathy in the best way they transfer with consideration and care. In my favourite of these little moments, there’s a scene the place Richard Parker slips a paw beneath his chin to observe Pi. The expression’s each menacingly predatory and as approachable as a housecat. Pi, when his interviewers demand a extra rational rationalization for his survival, challenges them with the query “Which is the higher story, the story with animals or the story with out animals?” Who would say no to the one with animals, particularly when the animals seem like this?

Adblock take a look at (Why?)