Following a very busy April, in which two dozen new shows opened to end the Tony Award-eligible season, a host of new musicals by debuting composers arrived, many of them adaptations of popular novels and their subsequent movie versions.
* Water for Elephants — Who wouldn’t want to run away and join the circus, even one so ramshackle and cash-strapped as the Depression-era Benzini Brothers troupe, the focus of Sara Gruen’s beloved 2006 novel and the acclaimed film five years later? Still, a leap to the musical stage was hardly a natural transition, but you would never know that from what a team of Broadway veterans — like writer Rick Elice (Jersey Boys) and director Jessica Stone (Kimberly Akimbo) — and newcomers — circus effects designer and co-choreographer Shana Carroll, as well as a songwriting committee collectively known as PigPen Theatre Co. — have wrought from the material. Factor in the best life-sized animal puppetry since The Lion King and you have an eye-popping, emotional journey that should entertain all ages.
Elice tells the story largely in flashback, as we first meet an elderly Jacob Jankowski (Gregg Edelman), who recalls his younger self (hunky Grant Gustin), a trained veterinarian, who ingratiates himself with the circus folk by attending to the troupe’s ailing animals. These include an ethereal white stallion named Silver Star, ridden by the alluring Marlena (Isabelle McCalla), to whom Jacob is instantly attracted. Alas, she is married to the circus’s surly, jealous ringmaster August (Paul Alexander Nolan) who takes just as rapid a dislike for Jacob.
A pair of artful acrobats embody Silver Star as a puppet, as is the show’s true star, a lumbering pachyderm named Rosie, first seen as detached anatomical parts — her ears, trunk and leg — before arriving in her fully assembled elephantine glory. Add in an ensemble of nimble circus performers and you have a kinetic production that is both a visual and emotional stunner. At a time when so many film adaptation musicals merely reproduce the movie with songs inserted along the way, Water for Elephants truly transforms its source material into a singular stage experience.
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St., $59-$299. 800-447-7400.
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* The Notebook — Yes, there are caps and T-shirts on sale at the Schoenfeld Theatre’s concession stand, but the item you may really need is the souvenir box of facial tissues, ideal for drying the tears this tale of enduring love is likely to elicit from you. The popularity of Nicholas Sparks’ weepy 1996 debut novel and the subsequent 2004 Ryan Gosling-Rachel McAdams movie means that much of the audience will probably be familiar with this saga of romance and dementia, but that is unlikely to prevent them from being overwhelmed by the tale’s emotions.
Being faithful to what Sparks created yet taking the stage show into fresh territory, book writer Bekah Brunstetter serves up the central couple, Noah and Allie, at three points in their lives rather than the film’s two. And the three couples — Younger (John Cardoza, Jordan Tyson), Middle (Ryan Vasquez, Joy Woods) and Older (Dorian Harewood, Maryann Plunkett) entities — often appear onstage together, observing each other, an artful comment on memory and the recollection of our pasts.
As you probably recall, the well-heeled visiting teenage Allie and impoverished local boy Noah meet and are quickly smitten with each other, but her parents are determined to break up a union they deem unworthy of their daughter. They succeed when Noah is called up to fight in Vietnam — an update from the original story — but he survives the war and reunites with Allie, who was momentarily engaged to another, clearly less worthy, suitor. All of this is told in flashback, as the Older Noah reads their story from the titular notebook to Older Allie, trying to break through in her dementia-ravaged condition.
As hokey as that sounds in the retelling, it proves to be remarkably affecting and effective onstage, due in no small part to veteran performers Harewood and Plunkett as the oldest couple. He in his aching yearning to reach her, she in a fog as she struggles to find personal meaning in the story she is hearing. Songwriter Ingrid Michaelson makes little effort to musicalize their part of the story, but provides a pleasant, if unremarkable, score to illustrate the budding romance of their younger selves. (And yes, movie fans, co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams do deliver that iconic rainstorm clinch as they reunite.) Sparks and the musical’s creators put obstacles galore in Noah and Allie’s way, but never doubt the potential for a happy, or at least hopeful, ending.
THE NOTEBOOK, Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St. $55-$299. 800-447-7400.
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* The Outsiders — Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A gang of down-and-out teens are pitted against a better-heeled rival gang, leading to a violently choreographed rumble after a pair of romantics cross over from opposite camps. The source material is S.E. Hinton’s cult classic young adult novel of restless life in Tulsa, Okla., circa 1967, but it would be hard not to have the better West Side Story — from 10 years earlier — come to mind. Or perhaps it is Francis Ford Coppola’s pre-Godfather teen angst film version of Hinton’s yarn that will be recalled and make this workmanlike musical pale by comparison.
But if you can put aside the retread nature of the material, there is plenty of fresh talent to admire in the young cast and creative team. At the center of the tale is a trio of orphaned “Greasers,” 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant in a breakout, potentially star-making performance), beefy middle brother Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and the eldest, Darrel (Brent Comer), forced into a parental role after their folks die in an auto crash.
Adapters Adam Rapp and Justin Levine harness the sprawling tale well to the Jacobs Theatre stage, married to an urgent, twangy score by Levine and a Texas twosome that goes by the handle Jamestown Revival. Standout numbers include the longing “Great Expectations” (after the Dickens novel that Ponyboy lugs around) and the penultimate tune, “Stay Gold,” echoing an insistent catch phrase from the film. Director Dayna Taymor corrals her young cast ably and gets a major assist from the energetic choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman.
More than half a century after its publication, Hinton’s novel still speaks to and draws young readers and perhaps the musical will similarly attract new audiences to the theater, oblivious to the déjà vu nature of the production.
THE OUTSIDERS, Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St. $69-$349. 800-447-7400.
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* Suffs — With so many people claiming to be indifferent to the current presidential candidates and unlikely to vote this fall, the time is ripe for a musical about what women went through originally to gain the right to vote. A musical like Suffs, written by and starring Shaina Taub, with an all-female cast, director (Leigh Silverman), choreographer (Mayte Natalio) and music supervisor (Andrea Grody). Girl power!
It is a history lesson with resonances to today. Like 1776 or Titanic, the outcome of this battle by the Suffragists – don’t call them “Suffragettes,” a diminutive and pejorative term — is not in doubt, even as their landmark victory begins to seem extremely unlikely.
Taub writes herself into the middle of the action as firebrand Alice Paul, played quite capably by alternate Hawley Gould at the performance I caught. Among the more prominent figures in the 17-member cast, Paul pits herself against establishment leader Carrie Chapman Catt (the admirable Jenn Collella) and African-American agitator Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James). Ultimately, the key obstacle to suffrage is President Woodrow Wilson (a more cartoonish-than-necessary Grace McLean).
Taub’s pleasant but hardly memorable score kicks off with an insistent plea, “Let Mother Vote,” followed by a more confrontational “G.A.B.” (“Great American Bitch”) and ultimately a victory anthem, “Keep Marching.” If Suffs brings to mind that other musical history lesson, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda need not feel threatened by Taub’s melodic or lyric skills. Still, as message musicals go, Suffs is a sufficiently rousing pageant that should energize and entertain contemporary successors to these justifiably remembered rabble-rousers.
SUFFS, Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St. $59-$299. 800-447-7400.