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    ‘Water for Elephants’ Brings the Circus to Broadway

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    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.Antoine Boissereau’s aerial silk performance in which he portrays the death of a horse during the song “Easy.”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).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Next Up at the Home of ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’? A Circus, of Course.

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      The San Francisco theater where the musical revue ran for decades will get a new show in the fall by the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective.Gypsy Snider was just 4 when she began performing alongside the red-nosed clowns and unflappable jugglers of the Pickle Family Circus, a San Francisco troupe that her parents helped found. She went on to join the Cirque du Soleil before becoming a co-founder of the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective, and creating dazzling acrobatic and trapeze numbers for the Tony-award-winning 2013 revival of “Pippin” on Broadway.Now, Snider, 51, is returning to San Francisco as one of the artistic directors of a new 7 Fingers circus production celebrating the city’s colorful history that will open in the fall at Club Fugazi, the venerable North Beach theater that was home to the long-running musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon.”While the show has not yet been named, it is described as a love letter to San Francisco and will include scenes about the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and the Summer of Love.The production, which was announced Wednesday by one of the show’s producers, David Dower, will also be a homecoming for its other artistic director, Shana Carroll, a Berkeley native who started her career as a trapeze artist with the Pickle Family Circus. Like Snider, Carroll helped found the 7 Fingers (or “Les 7 Doigts de la Main,” in French), a pathbreaking troupe that started in 2002.From her childhood, Snider said, she was enchanted by the concept of contemporary circus that began to take hold in the 1970s, a human spectacle driven by emotion, artistry and narrative instead of the elephants and tigers of the Ringling Brothers.“I wanted to create a circus I had never seen before,” Snider said. “I was more interested in what you could do to elevate circus through storytelling.”Now she and Carroll are returning home to the Bay Area, with a circus that they hope will bring new life to Club Fugazi, where “Beach Blanket Babylon,” a zany spoof, ended its remarkable 45-year run in 2019. “The idea was that we were going to be more connected to the community that raised us,” Snider said.The pandemic delayed their plans by more than a year, but now that the performing arts are making a comeback across the country, the project has the green light: The trapeze is being installed, and tickets will soon go on sale.The century-old Club Fugazi building is much smaller than the spacious arenas that many circus audiences are used to, but to Snider, that is very much the point. Getting closer to the action makes it a visceral, intimate experience, she says.The theater will remove balcony seating that “Beach Blanket Babylon” had added and rebuild the stage so it protrudes into the audience, cabaret style. The idea is that after many people spent months confined to their couches, passively watching television and movies, this show will make audience members feel as though the circus performers might just end up on their laps (which they won’t, assuming all goes well).The cast and production team, who have all been vaccinated, plan to start their initial workshops for the show in the next couple of weeks. It is unclear how many audience members the city will allow inside the theater come fall, but no matter the capacity level, the creative team hopes that the show will propel San Francisco back into vibrancy after an extended live performance drought.“Circus is so death defying that it’s life affirming,” Snider said. “That’s what we want cabaret to do in San Francisco in a post-pandemic society.” More