I saw a person I know from Thursday.... working at the merch in the lobby...
_________________
The Belching Green Ogre Has a Song in His Heart
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: December 15, 2008
’Tis love, the fairy tales tell us, that turns dross into gold and clods into gods. So it seems appropriate that about halfway through the leaden fairy-tale-theme costume party called “Shrek the Musical,” which opened Sunday night at the Broadway Theater, it’s a love scene that gives us a startling glimpse of true happiness.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Joan Marcus
That vision arrives when the hitherto adversarial hero and heroine of this latest screen-to-stage musical, adapted from the popular 2001 animated film and the children’s book by William Steig, recognize they just might have something in common. Never mind that this something appears to be a shared affinity for breaking wind and belching really loudly.
As embodied by Brian d’Arcy James and Sutton Foster in a breezy song called “I Think I Got You Beat,” Shrek the ogre and Fiona the princess find a chemistry that’s more than merely gaseous. In the best tradition of screwball comedy, they transform glowery friction into dewy-eyed romance. And a show that has been trying way too hard to entrance us suddenly relaxes into goofy, genuine charm.
Such metamorphoses happen but seldom in “Shrek,” directed by Jason Moore, with a score by Jeanine Tesori and a book and lyrics by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Aside from a few jolly sequences (nearly all featuring the hypertalented Ms. Foster), this cavalcade of storybook effigies feels like 40 blocks’ worth of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, accompanied by an exhaustingly jokey running commentary.
“Shrek,” for the record, is not bad. The maiden Broadway venture of DreamWorks Theatricals (a stage-oriented arm of the company that made the movie), in association with Neal Street Productions, it is definitely a cut above the most recent offerings from its creators’ direct competitor in cartoon-inspired musicals, Walt Disney. Unlike that company’s “Tarzan” and “Little Mermaid,” “Shrek” has the virtues of a comprehensible plot and identifiable characters. And as designed by Tim Hatley, whose set captures some of the feral majesty of Steig’s original drawings, the show isn’t the eyesore that Disney’s fish story is.
But “Shrek” does not avoid the watery fate that commonly befalls good cartoons that are dragged into the third dimension. What seems blithe and fluid on screen becomes lumbering when it takes on the weight of solid human flesh.
The pop-cultural jokes and “Fractured Fairy Tales”-like spoofery that are the currency of “Shrek” (and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sticks close to the screenplay) passed in the wink of a mischievous eye on screen. Onstage they seem to linger and grow old. And morals about inner beauty and self-esteem that went down easily enough in the movie stick in the throat when amplified into power ballads with lyrics explaining that “What makes us special makes us strong.”
Then there’s the issue of performers having to dress up to resemble fantasy illustrations, a process that, to put it kindly, tends to cramp expressive acting. As the title character, a misanthropic green ogre who learns to love, the talented Mr. James is so encumbered with padding and prosthetics that your instinct is to rush the stage and tap his head to see if he’s really in there.
He’s not the only one competing with his costume. As the evil, psychologically maimed Lord Farquaad, the very droll (and normally tall) Christopher Sieber is required to walk on his knees, with tiny fake legs dangling before him — an initially funny sight gag that soon drags, despite being the subject of countless inventive variations. As Shrek’s sidekick, the sassy Donkey, Daniel Breaker at least appears to be having a good time in his furry coverall, letting his fetlocks go limp in dismay and cutting up like a hirsute Little Richard at the Mardi Gras.
What with a whole phalanx of bedtime-story archetypes, led by a falsetto-voiced John Tartaglia as Pinocchio, as well as a giant pink dragon puppet with rolling eyes, the show starts to feel like a Christmas panto, one of those silly seasonal shows beloved in Britain and bearable because, like Santa Claus, they come around only once a year. That’s one parallel that came to my mind. The other, when I was feeling less charitable, was of seeing out-of-work actors dressed up as tacos and French fries in a mall food court.
I never felt that way when Ms. Foster was onstage, though. A performer of eight-cylinder energy and eye-searing presence, she can be a bit grating in earnest parts (as in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Little Women”). But more recently, with “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein,” she has emerged as an inspired, take-charge musical comedian in the tradition of Danny Kaye and Carol Burnett. (Seeing her in her damsel-in-distress attire, I wondered what she might make of the loud-mouthed princess in “Once Upon a Mattress,” the vehicle that made Ms. Burnett a star.)
Fiona’s big showstopper, the second-act curtain raiser “Morning Person,” is the one number in “Shrek” that gets everything right. Up to that point Josh Prince’s choreography had rarely transcended Radio City Music Hall rote, and Ms. Tesori’s score had seemed cut from the same shiny synthetic pop metal of most youth-oriented Broadway shows since “Wicked.” The staging by Mr. Moore (who knows from puppets, having directed “Avenue Q”) had seemed to move on a gag-by-gag basis.
But “Morning Person,” in which Fiona sings of the joys of a new day with an enthusiasm that crushes whatever crosses her path, has bona-fide wit. Whether blithely ripping the antlers off a deer or tapping like Ann Miller with a chorus line of rats, Ms. Foster manages both to make fun of and exult in classical musical-comedy moves while creating a real, full character at the same time. That the number works as well as it does has a lot to do with there being real human warmth (heck, make that fire) at its center.
Fiona is fun. No wonder Shrek falls in love with her. And when Mr. James responds to her, you realize that there’s a winning character (not to mention a very fine actor and singer) inside that fright suit. I know, I know, that’s what the show’s about: the beauty within. But it seems to me that if “Shrek” had more generally heeded its own advice about substance versus surface, it might have come closer to casting the spell that lets Broadway shows live happily ever after.
SHREK THE MUSICAL
Based on the DreamWorks Animation motion picture and the book by William Steig; book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire; music by Jeanine Tesori; directed by Jason Moore; choreography by Josh Prince; music direction and incidental music arrangements by Tim Weil; orchestrations by Danny Troob; sets and costumes by Tim Hatley; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; sound by Peter Hylenski; hair and wig design by David Brian-Brown; makeup design by Naomi Donne; puppet design by Mr. Hatley; illusions consultant, Marshall Magoon; associate director, Peter Lawrence; production manager, Aurora Productions; dance arrangements by Matthew Sklar; vocal arrangements by Ms. Tesori and Mr. Weil; associate orchestrator, John Clancy; music coordinator, Michael Keller; general manager, Stuart Thompson Productions/James Triner. Presented by DreamWorks Theatricals and Neal Street Productions. At the Broadway Theater, 1681 Broadway, at 53rd Street, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: Brian d’Arcy James (Shrek), Sutton Foster (Princess Fiona), Christopher Sieber (Lord Farquaad), John Tartaglia (Pinocchio/the Magic Mirror/Dragon Puppeteer) and Daniel Breaker (Donkey).
