Playbill: A trip across the ocean has begun at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre for the five shipwrecked survivors at the center of Lolita Chakrabarti (Red Velvet)'s Life of Pi—sixteen-year-old Pi, a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The Broadway bow for the work, which adapts the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Yann Martel, gave a sneak preview of the show as cast members met with the press March 14. Previews began March 9 for the production which will open March 30.
6 comments:
I first heard about this show when I heard about the technical wonders it features. I have seen the movie a while ago and read the book even longer ago and I vaguely remember both of them. However, it was hearing about the technicality of the show that first got me interested in seeing it. After reading this article and watching the video along with it, I want to see the show even more. The video makes the show look totally immersive and engaging. The technical features are unbelievable but what really stands out to me, like this article says, is the puppetry work. I have never given much thought to puppets and what they can do for a show. The puppets in this show are incredibly beautiful and are definitely very important to the show. The puppets have a vibrant quality to them that is full of life and I can’t wait to see them played out in person.
I watched this movie when I was little with my parents. I remember being fascinated by the special aspects of the movie. Additionally, I remember that my parents were also blown away which was cool to see. We couldn’t figure out how the Tiger was actually put in. We did our own research to learn of course but it's awesome to know that even live on stage people are still wondering how they did it all these years later. Puppeting is an incredibly intricate art form, even on such a large scale. Each piece of this tiger has to move in a certain way for it to be believable. And the team working on that aspect of the show absolutely crushed it. It takes many people even just to operate a puppet of this scale and each of those people needs to feel comfortable and safe otherwise there is a place for disaster to creep in.
The previews of Life of Pi on Broadway are absolutely blowing the minds of the entire theatre world in the United States. Not only is the story great, the set is great, but the puppetry makes it as good of a show as it is. Most shows I’ve seen with puppets are what stands out to me the most, because they are such a special thing to use. One of the more intriguing parts of this puppet (and of puppetry as a whole) is how three people have to work together for this particular puppet to portray essentially a single character. And not only that, it’s an animal. They have to learn how to collectively be a tiger, which is already a difficult thing for one person to do. I hope I’m able to, by a miracle, make it out to New York City while it is running.
As someone who grew up with both the movie and book of Life of Pi and then analyzed the book in english I am so excited for this play. A saying a hard growing up never work with puppets, animals or babies in the entertainment industry and having a puppet that is an animal in my mind is one of the only exceptions. I love how the characterization and personality of the tiger moves so beautifully through space and how you can see the actors playing the puppet, however it almost looks like the tiger is real and dangerous. Overall, the lighting and sound compound with the puppetry will create this really beautiful effect of a tiger onstage. I am very excited to see where this show goes as I feel it has the potential to bring up both nostalgia and the true emotions this book can provide and bring up.
Theo
This show is absolutely beautiful. Just by watching the short clip in this article, I had goosebumps from the visual effects and from how alive the show seemed. I love any show with puppets, and this one seems especially challenging because of how life-like the tiger is and crucial it is to the storyline. Not only that but there are other animals for this show that are also puppets, and finding enough puppeteers to command these puppets must’ve been a hard thing to do. Working as an ensemble and embodying an animal for nights on end, has to be a very challenging and technical accomplishment because of how reliant the story is on these animals being portrayed correctly. I know this book and movie are very moving, and I once I have time I plan to read the book. My goal is to go and see this show on Broadway when it opens because of how technically fabulous this show is and how the puppets really do emotionally move someone, just as the actor said in the article.
Life of pi is a production that I’m very excited to see. The movie has been one of my favorites since I was a kid. But I've become interested in puppet design. We’ve used a lot of puppets recently at the school and it’s something I never thought I would gain interest in. But the set design in the puppets for life of pi are so intricate and I feel like they embody the piece. The article talked about it being one of the hardest things that the puppet designer and the scenic designer did. But I think the result that they created is something that they should be proud of. I remember the first time that we watched a video of this production. My jaw literally dropped. Using puppets on stage rather than say a prop or a human or something like that brings a different depth to the piece.
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