How did you spend your summer vacation?
Ian Shaw, as a four-year-old back in the summer of ’74, headed across the Atlantic to Martha’s Vineyard. His dad—the not-so-cuddly curmudgeon movie star Robert Shaw—was filming what turned out to be Steven Speilberg’s first blockbuster, Jaws. One of ten progeny of the hard-living and heavy-drinking Brit actor, it is unknown just how much time the lad spent observing dad and associates struggling with the recalcitrant mechanical shark (nicknamed “Bruce”). What is clear is that Ian has over the decades absorbed numerous tales of Jaws lore, to the point where he and collaborator Joseph Nixon have devised a three-men-on-a-boat entertainment called, pointedly and quite literally, The Shark Is Broken.
A study not of movie-making but of sitting around waiting during the endless delays of movie-making, the play takes the act of watching celebrities acting badly offscreen (though acting epically heroically when the cameras rolled) to extremes. The participants are the mercurial elder Shaw, the most bankable of the three courtesy of prior starring roles in The Sting and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; the relatively intellectual—or is it pedantic?—Roy Scheider, who had already made his mark in The French Connection; and the excessively neurotic, up-and-coming newcomer Richard Dreyfuss. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. That said, countless actors have aspired, without success, to attain this level of celebrity.
[Read Bob Verini’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The younger Mr. Shaw, who is now older than his father was when he died in 1978 at the age of 51, has stepped into his father’s deck shoes. He is joined by actors Colin Donnell (partner to Sutton Foster in both Anything Goes and Violet), who has the mannerisms of the late Scheider down pat, and Alex Brightman (of School of Rock and Beetlejuice), who limns a supremely sharp sketch of an impossibly but believably annoying Dreyfuss. The two American actors, by now quite familiar for their Broadway musical appearances, offer exceptionally diverting caricatures.
Director Guy Masterson’s production is deceptively simple, featuring just those three men on the boat. Or a partial, cutaway boat, placed in front of a curved cyclorama of endless ocean and sky, looking like a low-budget facsimile of the real thing (which, indeed, belies Dreyfuss’s kvetching that they should have just shot the film in a tank on the Universal lot). Designer Duncan Henderson, lighting designer Jon Clark, and video designer Nina Dunn have done a witty job of it, including an artfully flimsy-looking strip of “ocean” video lapping at the stage left bottom corner of the boat. Composer/sound designer Adam Cork is sure to throw in a bit of that instantly iconic deep-sea throbbing.
Meanwhile, the actors wait day after day on the boat for the director, the crew, and the shark to get on with it. As the tongue-in-cheek authors have Scheider explain to Dreyfuss: “It’s not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time. It’s the time it takes between the takes that takes the time to take the take.”
For those who’ve never seen Jaws, or are unfamiliar with the Shaw-Scheider-Dreyfuss trio—well, I suppose the proceedings might leave you at sea.
At one point late in the proceedings, Brightman launches into a wickedly offhanded capsule impression of Scheider and Shaw; or is he doing Donnell as Scheider and Shaw as Shaw? Or is he mimicking Dreyfuss aping Scheider and Shaw; or maybe laying low Dreyfuss, Scheider, Shaw, Donnell, Ian Shaw, and himself?
Whatever he’s doing, its mighty funny. As is the whole 95 minutes of three men—no, three actors with a broken mechanical shark—on a boat. All laughter, with no threat of a shark attack. ’Cause the shark is broken.
The Shark Is Broken opened August 10, 2023, at the John Golden Theatre and runs through November 19. Tickets and information: thesharkisbroken.com
