"WATER FOR ELEPHANTS:" Very Old Circus Stories
I have some history with circuses. From age 16, throughout high school, I worked the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus as a Madison Square Garden vendor; my after-school gig. Knick games and Elton John concerts were fun, I sometimes set down my emptied vendor tray and just watched, but the circus was money; three shows a day on weekends, with no time to look around. I came home encased, literally head-to-toe, in a fine cotton candy glaze.
The stickiness of that glaze re-enwrapped me in memory as I watched Water for Elephants, a new circus musical that just opened on Broadway. The show moves sweetly at times, in a Cirque du Soleil sense, meaning it mostly twirls, with feet off the ground. The rest of it is a slog, akin to three shows a day at the Garden. The rambunctious cast works as hard as any real circus performers I ever saw, but the script — by Jersey Boys librettist Rick Elice, from the best-selling book (and, yes, movie) by Sara Gruen — flattens them with every circus story stereotype you ever saw. Sadistic ringmaster/circus owner? Check. Sadistic ringmaster’s beautiful, acrobatic, miserable, much younger wife? Check. Winsome, wise beyond its years, elephant? Check. Grumpy doomed clown? Check. Kindly, but aging, doomed working-stiff roustabout? Check. Murderous psychopathic roustabout? Double check.
Water for Elephants also commits an unpardonable sin, for a Broadway musical: it makes a beloved musical theater veteran — four-time Tony nominee Greg Edelman — look lost, as an elder circus veterinarian aimlessly reliving (and intrusively narrating) his own flashbacks as a young circus newbie who falls in love with both the elephant and the circus owner’s wife.
I saw my first circus at the New York Coliseum — a now-vanished, mausoleum-like convention center on Columbus Circle that no one today needs to remember. That circus barely had a name — I think it was called The Coliseum Christmas Circus — but my parents gave it to us as a Chanukah present, which meant we attended under false pretenses. The Coliseum Christmas Circus possessed the requisite three rings, I believe, but I recollect acts loitering right outside in the hallway while waiting to go on; we passed them on our way to the bathroom. The Coliseum Christmas Circus also had the requisite ringmaster, a Borscht Belt comedian named Morty Gunty, in top hat and red tux, whom my father knew from the Catskills just well enough for us to get to shake his hand before Morty headed out into the ring. I recall little about the Coliseum Christmas Circus beyond that, but I do know it had wild animals because I vividly remember their smell permeating the Coliseum. I also remember that Ringmaster Morty had a big bullwhip. I remember this because my little sister, who notoriously hated loud noises, lost her cookies the first time Morty cracked that whip. She had to be physically removed, screaming louder than the whole circus put together, never to return.
It’s possible you’ll surrender to Water for Elephants’ incessant circus cliches without screaming. I didn’t, but the New York Times’ chief drama critic did, so anything is possible. Some fine acrobats are flung around and there is a plenitude of puppetry — including an animal rampage toward the end of Act Two that freezes the narrative in a series of puppet tableaus during what could have been someone’s 11:00 o’clock number. But isn’t.
No great loss. Water for Elephants’ musical score is little more than an accretion of anodyne, Roots-ish-Americana riffs and reprises by a composing consortium billed as “PigPen Theatre Co.” What Water for Elephants most egregiously lacks, I suddenly realize, is a composer, singular, with a passionate, levitating musical point of view. Think of the score that Stephen Schwartz handed Bob Fosse for Pippin. Glory, glory. Now that was a circus musical.