Still, for many in the audience, the immersive nature of the experience will be more than enough. I do not overstate there. Despite watching decades worth of attempts, I’ve never seen a show that better conveys the sea or so many of the creatures trying to ride its waves and avoid being swallowed.
Life of Pi
Opening Night: March 30, 2023
Theater: Gerald Schoenfeld
Website: www.lifeofpibway.com
After a cargo ship sinks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi is left stranded on a lifeboat with the most unlikely of companions: a Royal Bengal tiger. With time and nature against them, the two must learn to trust one another if they are to survive.
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March 30, 2023
With dazzling imagination and sublime control, the show’s cast and crew conjure a delirious, dynamic, highly pettable world. And oh, is it a wonder. Though the play is ostensibly about one boy’s fraught survival after a disaster, that story is somewhat thin. “Life of Pi” instead succeeds as a broader tribute to human ingenuity and animal grace.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
Pi is not afraid to hold seemingly opposite logics and faiths in the same hand. Neither is Chakrabarti in a brilliantly-staged dramedy that constantly blurs the lines between fact and fiction.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
Still, visual appeal can’t quite wash away a stacked-deck ending, or make a convincing case for the fanciful over the plausible. Deep down, Mr. Okamoto probably agrees.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
But on the whole, “Life of Pi” is a most impressive and well-executed piece of theater. It’s a shame that Richard Parker is likely not eligible for a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Then again, one suspects that the artists that brought the tiger and the other animals and visual effects to life will be deservedly recognized.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
Webster’s stagecraft is dazzling, but don’t expect Life of Pi to make you believe in God. It will make you believe in puppet shows, and that may be enough.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
“My story will make you believe in God,” Pi insists. Whether or not that’s true, it’s impossible to doubt such powerful theatrical stagecraft.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
It’s an accomplishment for any performer to stand out amid a special-effects-heavy show such as this, but Abeysekera turns out to be just as good a reason to see the visually enchanting Life of Pi as the puppets.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
A pair of extraordinary elements make the new spectacle show “Life of Pi” seaworthy: stunning projections, and a better-than-necessary lead performance from the sensational Hiran Abeysekera. Working in tandem during the second act, when teenage Pi is adrift in the ocean with only dangerous zoo animals to keep him company, those fantastical images and Abeysekera’s boisterous energy create moment after moment of theatrical magic.
March 30, 2023
The danger of Richard Parker has been established early in Life of Pi, a charming theatrical adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti of Yann Martel’s bestselling novel that for all its puppetry and special effects feels a gentle, modest enterprise.
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We’re here for the tiger, folks—and yes, this tiger is pretty cool. It’s a pity that he’s stranded in a story awash with platitudes.
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But, echoing the miraculous survival of the central character, nicknamed Pi, played by the astounding young actor Hiran Abeysekera, the imaginative stage rendering of the book, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster, delivers a mostly exhilarating evening of theater, against those mighty odds.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 30, 2023
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti and director Max Webster, who premiered their version in the West End before bringing it to Broadway, turn the tale into a biologist’s dream, populating the stage—awash in Andrzej Goulding’s remarkable video designs—with Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’ cavalcade of inventive puppet designs (giraffes, hyenas, orangutans, oh my). Under Caldwell’s movement direction, fish dart about with hypnotic swiftness, butterflies float as gracefully as ever, and Richard Parker takes on more character than some of his human counterparts onstage this season.
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Adaptations of Life of Pi have won everything from Oscars to the Booker Prize to Olivier Awards, and there is no doubt with this dazzling Broadway production that Tony Awards are sure to follow.
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