‘Water for Elephants’ Brings the Circus to Broadway

At the sound of a gunshot, a performer, wreathed in white silks, tumbles from the ceiling. His body somersaults, over and over, faster and faster, until it hangs suspended, just above the stage floor. This scene, in the first act of “Water for Elephants,” a new musical that begins previews Feb. 24 at the Imperial Theater, portrays the death of an injured horse. And it captures the singular methods of the show — a synthesis of theater and circus, bedazzled for a Broadway audience.

“In musicals, you talk until you have to sing and you sing until you have to dance,” Jessica Stone, the director of “Water for Elephants,” explained. “And in our case, you dance until you have to leap into the air.”

With a book by Rick Elice, and music and lyrics by PigPen Theater Co., the musical is based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel, which also inspired a 2011 film. Set in the 1930s and in the very early 2000s, it centers on the memories of Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin, playing the younger version, and Gregg Edelman as the elder), a veterinarian who recalls the long-ago days when he hopped a train and fell in with the members of the Benzini Brothers circus, a ragtag outfit that crisscrossed the country delivering low-rent, high-excitement marvels.

“You wanna feel something/You know is real, something/beyond the paler things,” the chorus sings in the opening number, describing the promise of the big top.

That promise is kept by the ensemble’s seven dedicated circus performers, as well as two swings, many of them veterans of the 7 Fingers circus company. Shana Carroll, a founding director of that company, was tasked with circus design. (With Jesse Robb, she is also the show’s co-choreographer.) In their initial meetings before the show’s premiere last summer in Atlanta, Carroll and Stone agreed that the circus stunts should never appear without cause. They had to tell the story (as in a scene set during a Benzini show) or enhance moments of high emotion (as in the case of the horse).