It’s been several days and nights since I caught a preview performance of Broadway’s new musical adaptation of King Kong, and I still can’t get that dang gorilla’s face out of my head.
This ape-like being isn’t a live animal, mind you, but a 2,000-pound puppet conceived by acclaimed “creature designer” Sonny Tilders and manipulated by more than a dozen puppeteers. Some are dimly visible onstage, but you’ll barely notice, riveted as you will be by his mighty, wrinkled “wonder,” as the show’s heroine and its villain both call the title character, who falls prey to the insensitivity and greed of supposedly higher primates.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★ review here.]
Years ago, I was reduced to heaving sobs by the Broadway production of War Horse, another show that incorporated puppetry to evoke the suffering of a non-human animal—though there the craftsmanship, while masterful, left more to the imagination (and more to the dialogue). My experience with King Kong was less cathartic, and more sour. After witnessing Kong’s elaborately executed capture in the first act, I spent much of the second dreading those scenes where I would have to meet his gaze, knowing what still lay ahead and that it would be just as graphically wrought, if not more so.
To be fair, none of the folks I spotted sitting around me in the orchestra section showed signs of sharing my distress. There was a fair amount of laughter, first as Kong confronted and bonded with aspiring actress Ann Darrow, then later and more surprisingly as he fought off tormentors armed with gas and guns, in scenes made both spectacular and painfully accessible by Peter England’s set and projection design, Peter Mumford’s evocative lighting, and Peter Hylenski’s muscular sound. There was also applause, presumably for Kong, though the Peters and their various collaborators (among them Artists in Motion, credited with “video and projection imaging content”) deserved their share as well.
Born in Australia and arriving on Broadway after considerable retooling, this King Kong follows the basic plot of the 1933 film (and the novella that preceded it a year earlier): An American film crew led by the ambitious director Carl Denham, with Ann in tow, discovers Kong after sailing to his home, Skull Island, and drags him back to New York to showcase to live audiences. The enterprise—spoiler alert, for the five people on the planet who may not be familiar with the story—ends atop the Empire State Building, badly.
But the musical departs from the original movie, and subsequent remakes, in eliminating another central male character created as a love interest for Ann, who is presented here not as a stereotypical damsel but, in a feisty and endearing performance from African-American actress Christiani Pitts, as a woman determined to fend for herself. Librettist Jack Thorne and songwriter Eddie Perfect establish this from the get-go by having Ann endure, in the opening number, a series of unsuccessful and humiliating auditions and emerge tough enough to talk back, in the scene where she meets Carl, to a bartender who tries to oust her.
Perfect’s songs, like the brooding accompanying music by La La Land and Moulin Rouge! alum Marius de Vries, are mostly forgettable; at best they function as vehicles for the whirlwind production numbers offered by director-choreographer Drew McOnie. A hot property across the Atlantic for his work on Strictly Ballroom: The Musical and several well-received revivals, McOnie keeps his company in constant, breathless motion, matching the business and prowess of the design as we are transported from a buzzing metropolis to a ship at sail on a glorious sea to the lush, exotic island, and back.
The exceptions are Ann’s scenes with the male characters: Kong, Carl, and Lumpy, an employee of the filmmaker who as presented here—awkward, luckless, and saintly in his kindness—seems to exist chiefly to underline the callous, sexist, greedy Carl’s sheer awfulness. (Eric William Morris is as gamely slimy in the last role as Eric Lochtefeld is touching as Lumpy.) Like a number of splashy, expensive shows (and films) that have lamented our obsession with money and power, King Kong employs excess to rail against it; it’s this heavy-handedness that likely left me feeling manipulated by the unsparing depictions of cruelty, and of Kong’s despair—and by the feminist implications in Ann’s makeover, for that matter.
Thorne’s record of intelligent, nuanced, morally complex work, which includes Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, suggests that his contributions may have been, like Kong, diminished by the forces of commerce. But that’s just speculation, and frankly, few will attend this musical expecting the characters, human or otherwise, to be drawn with great sophistication. If technical wizardry is what you’re after—and you can withstand watching a magnificent beast endure repeated, extravagant physical and emotional abuse—King Kong may be just the ticket.
King Kong opened November 8, 2018, at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets and information: kingkongbroadway.com
