Even though parents often take their kids to Broadway musicals with Disney names attached, plays can be a different matter. Rarely does one come along that’s kiddie friendly. “Life of Pi,” which opened Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre after a long run on London’s West End, is that rarity.
Parents were able to take their children along with them at the Broadway play despite its themes of survival and cannibalism. Let’s assume it’s the puppets of animals that have turned Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about an Indian boy named Pi trapped on a small boat with a very hungry Bengal tiger into a show the youngsters will enjoy if they’ve already seen “The Lion King” too many times.
The three children sitting behind me at “Life of Pi” only occasionally interrupted their afternoon snack of potato chips to respond to what happens to an Indian family and its zoo when they are shipwrecked on their voyage to Canada. The Bengal Tiger is dwarfed by an ape, a Bengal tiger, and a zebra that has a broken leg. But the children were most excited about the small creatures. A little rat who jumps onto the boat when the ship sinks is particularly charming and is quickly eaten by the Hyena. A school of glow-in the-dark fish helps to divert attention from the second act’s fractured storyline.
As for the tiger, the hyena, the ape and the zebra with the broken leg, the kids behind me seemed to prefer diving into their Lay’s. Note to parents: Can I suggest Pringles for them? Its container doesn’t crackle.) To be frank, Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s puppets for “Life of Pi” lack the imagination of Julie Taymor and Michael Curry’s puppets for “The Lion King” and they lack the exaggerated size of the horses designed by the Handspring Puppet Company for “War Horse.” In that latter spectacle, adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, it was easy to forget about the puppeteers, because the huge equine structures they were manipulating totally dominated them. The horses weren’t life size. They were T-Rex sizes.
In Chakrabarti’s pedestrian adaptation, when Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) is trapped on the boat with the hyena, the rat, the ape and the zebra (the tiger is still floating around in the ocean at this point in the story), you don’t worry that the boy might be attacked or eaten by the hyena. All those puppeteers might sink the boat, you worry. The animals can be controlled by up to three people, depending on their size. At one point, the not-very-big-or-scary tiger requires four.
Let’s get back to the kids. They made “ick” noises when Pi strangles a sea turtle and drinks its blood, but squealed with approval when the tiger takes a dump on stage. They were, however, six thumbs-down when Pi takes a bite out of one of the tiger’s two turds.
The story with the animals aboard the boat is Pi’s first version of events. Later, an interrogator forces him to share another story. Daisuke Tsuji’s performance here is way over the top; he flies into such a rage that Pi could sue for child abuse. Another story shows the boy in a boat with three survivors from the shipwreck. One of them might have been his dinner. Max Webster’s efficient direction, Abeysekera’s balletic performance, and Tsuji’s rage work to gloss over the gorier aspects of consuming human flesh, especially for a vegetarian like Pi.
I was able to trust the children behind me. After all, this is New York and not Florida.
Robert Hofler was the theater critic for’s leading play. He also served as editor at Life Magazine, Us Weekly, Variety, and Variety. His books include “The man who invented rock Hudson”, “Party Animals”, and “Sexplosion. From Andy Warhol, to A Clockwork Orange: How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broken All the Taboos.” His most recent book, “Money, Murder and Dominick Dunne,” has just been published in paperback.