A pair of surprising elements creates latest show “Lifetime of Pi” seaworthy: stunning projections and a better-than-essential lead role by the sensational Hiran Abeyseker.
2 hours and quarter-hour with one intermission. On the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, 236 W forty fifth Street.
Working in tandem through the second act, with teenage Pi adrift within the ocean, accompanied only by dangerous zoo animals, these unbelievable imagery and Abeysekera’s raucous energy create moment-by-moment theatrical magic.
These are sequences of pure motion and ingenuity within the production of director Max Webster, which don’t rely on dialogue or plot to excite us, but only on pure emotion and awe. Not unlike the movie Avatar.
Nevertheless, not all ‘Pi’ that opened on Broadway on Thursday night have the identical moving visual impact.
The performance – an adaptation of Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s novel, reworked earlier Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film – starts out as a fairly easy, oddly written drama that takes a while to get going.
Shy Pi (Abeysekera), hiding under a hospital bed in Mexico, tells investigators how his childhood in Pondicherry, India led him to being the only real survivor of a tragic shipwreck.
On the one hand, the primary half of the primary act could possibly be called “The boring bit before the boat”, hampered by so-so ensemble acting and unexpectedly interrupted explanatory dialogue.
Alternatively, these early scenes represent the essential reason for the story’s existence: religion.
The precocious Pi (short for the French word “piscine”, meaning “swimming pool”) confuses parents and the community when he attends a Christian church, a Muslim mosque and a Hindu temple on one Friday and concludes that every tells a different story same story.
After all, before we watch the Bengal tiger dramatically run across the water, we forgot concerning the prayer part.
Pop Pi owns a zoo where we first meet a wild tiger, funnyly named Richard Parker.
The dolls by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell all have a horny, insular look of painted driftwood, but they are not believable.
While the puppetry is undoubtedly well done, my thoughts kept wandering to 2011’s War Horse, one other London import whose manipulated horses were stunning and likable characters in their very own right. The “Pi” animals are cute too, just don’t wow.
During a period of political unrest in India, Pi, his family and pets head to Canada aboard a ship – together with a vulgar French cook and rowdy sailors.
After they run into a storm and the ship sinks, only Pi survives, swimming in a lifeboat with an orangutan named Orange Juice and a growling Richard Parker.
His feisty vessel leaps impressively offstage (set design by Tim Hatley) and is framed by Andrew Goulding’s sharp cinematics of idyllic blue water.
Too often in theatrical plays, projections merely distract from flesh and blood actors, but Goulding blends perfectly with Hatley’s set design and Abeysekera’s playfulness.
(With the photographs projected directly onto the “Lifetime of Pi” stage, it is best viewed and appreciated from the mezzanine level.)
Pi fights like hell to survive despite starvation, dehydration, delusions and, you recognize, that tiger.
The attractiveness of Abeysekera is actually limitless as 3.14159. The actor making his Broadway debut has the fast curiosity of a youth, but he speaks in an absurdly sonorous voice that may go from deep to funny with the speed of a Bengal tiger.
Even surrounded by a sea of technology, puppets and plumbing, he has total control of the scene.
This is significant. In spite of everything, it isn’t called “Projector Life.”