The Shark is Broken
Opening Night: August 10, 2023
Theater: Golden Theatre
Website: thesharkisbroken.com
FADE IN: The open ocean, 1974. Filming is delayed…again. The lead actors—theatre veteran Robert Shaw and young Hollywood hotshots Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider—are crammed into a too-small boat, entirely at the mercy of foul weather and a faulty mechanical co-star. Alcohol flows, egos collide, and tempers flare on a chaotic voyage that just might lead to cinematic magic…if it doesn’t sink them all.
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August 11, 2023
Were it not for its curious meta-story, the play would be little more than a pleasant diversion: 95 minutes of bloodless, toothless, Hollywood-adjacent dramedy.
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August 10, 2023
But neither these glimpses at their private lives — nor the play’s treatment of the film’s troubled production — much exceed what one could read on Wikipedia. The play amounts to little more than a companion text, a dutiful piece of fan service without its own narrative engine.
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August 10, 2023
If not for our ongoing fascination with Jaws, The Shark Is Broken would be of limited interest: three men in a boat reading newspaper articles (“NIXON RESIGNS”), reminiscing about their childhoods, bickering about Hollywood and drinking a whole lot more than they should. But since the movie remains a cultural touchstone, the play makes for pleasant entertainment.
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August 10, 2023
Beyond its good will and nostalgic conjuring, The Shark Is Broken is too slender a tale, too gentle, to provide thrills or even, truth be told, much drama. It’s easy to imagine the delight of unexpectedly stumbling upon the production when it played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019. On Broadway, it feels a bit out of its depth.
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August 10, 2023
“Shark” was a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, and I’m sure it’s a show that would benefit from that kind of scrappiness and intimacy. Sometimes you need a smaller boat.
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August 10, 2023
And while for the characters themselves, being stuck on the boat is presented as some form of intolerable torture — for audiences, it’s definitely a wild ride worth taking.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 10, 2023
Slender though it may be, at a crisp 95 minutes it holds one’s attention in no small part because the actors playing their more famous counterparts are so superb, giving performances that perfectly capture the personas, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider, at least as documented in various books and movies about the making of “Jaws.”
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August 10, 2023
Fun summer movies are being turned into dreary summer theater this August. The tone-deaf “Back to the Future” musical is now followed by “The Shark Is Broken,” written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of the making of “Jaws.”
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Alas, the show doesn’t deliver much at all. Not only is the low-stakes script dull and pedestrian, but the characters change not at all, despite the premise of three wild men sitting in a boat, waiting not for Godot but sharks and Spielberg.
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August 10, 2023
But what they don’t know is that Jaws will go on to become the cultural totem we know it as today—and it is in the humorous and profound gap of past and present, known and unknown, and ignorance and wisdom that The Shark Is Broken wittily excels not just as a clever time capsule, but as an examination of male bonding and competitiveness, ego, frailty, fame, and film-making. Which is to say: you don’t miss the shark for one second.
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August 10, 2023
Ian Shaw’s The Shark Is Broken, a play with an impossibly successful track record from Edinburgh Fringe to West End hit to, now, Broadway’s Golden Theatre, attempts to pry its mandibles open and serve it two ways: as a father-son memoir and exorcism, and as a look into its notoriously grueling production. It bares its teeth at the former; eats the fat of the latter.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 10, 2023
Jaws was action-packed. The Shark Is Broken is all talk, and a pattern emerges. Shaw and Dreyfuss clash. Scheider referees. It gets repetitive over the 95-minute run time. On the plus side, there are moments when the warring trio clicks and a sort of camaraderie shines through. Plus, the co-authors seasoned the script with laughs.
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August 10, 2023
Like Back to the Future: The Musical, which just opened a few blocks away, The Shark Is Broken depends on your own affection for the property to make sense.
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