Review: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS at ASU Gammage

Guest contributor David Appleford gives his keen-eyed take on WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, on stage now through November 1st at ASU Gammage.

There’s a moment in WATER FOR ELPEPHANTS when the circus train feels like an exact metaphor for the show itself: it’s restless, noisy, even a little uneven, but capable of breathtaking beauty when all the moving parts suddenly fall into place. Some musicals ask you to listen. This one asks you to look up. The stage fills with aerialists and tumbling bodies along with the ghostly suggestion of circus animals as this thrilling adaptation turns a Tempe stage into an indoor big top.

Based on Sara Gruen’s enormously popular 2006 novel, the national touring company production, now playing at ASU Gammage until November 1, unfolds as a memory. An elderly resident of a nursing home, Mr. Jankowski (Robert Tully), slips quietly out the door and back into his youth, recalling the moment during the Great Depression when tragedy pushed him onto a passing circus train. That younger man, full name Jacob Jankowski (Zachary Keller), had been studying veterinary medicine at Cornell when fate intervened. Suddenly, with nothing holding him back, he hops aboard the train and stumbles into the traveling world of the Benzini Brothers Circus.

Rick Elice’s script propels the story forward just like the train that carries the troupe across America, and Jacob’s crash course in circus culture arrives quickly. Performers are known as “kinkers,” paying customers are “rubes,” and the ultimate punishment for troublemakers being “red-lighted” means getting tossed off the train while it’s moving, a moment we later witness, and it’s horrifying.

The company introduces Jacob to a gallery of colorful personalities: the weary odd-jobber and long-time circus worker Camel (Javier Garcia), the circus foreman Wade (Grant Huneycutt), plus a handful of performers who understand that show business, especially during the Depression, can be as precarious as a high-wire act. The script sketches this rough-and-tumble society with wit and economy, though it’s that very economy that often becomes the show’s weakness.

The narrative moves so briskly that certain character arcs feel abbreviated. It’s as though whole chapters of the story have either been streamlined or trimmed away to make room for the spectacle. But what the show may lack in narrative depth it compensates in theatrical imagination, and here the production is undeniably impressive.

Original director Jessica Stone and tour director Ryan Emmons embrace this circus tale with flair. The staging blends Broadway storytelling with cirque-style performance in ways that often feel seamless. Under circus designer Shana Carroll and co-choreographer Jesse Robb, the wide Gammage stage becomes a playground for acrobats and aerialists whose gravity-defying feats routinely drew audible gasps and applause from the opening night ASU audience.

These sequences are easily the production’s greatest asset. The ensemble of performers, many of them professional circus artists, execute their routines with astonishing precision, turning the stage into a swirl of bodies climbing ropes and bending in improbable shapes. At times, the acrobatics are so dazzling they threaten to overshadow the narrative entirely. You can’t help feeling that many audience members would happily watch another twenty minutes of these acts even if the plot paused altogether.

Visually, the show is a feast. Scenic designer Takeshi Kata and lighting designer Bradley King create a world that feels both weathered and magical, nicely capturing the atmosphere of a Depression-era traveling circus. The environment looks lived-in: rough wooden platforms and bursts of eye-popping color transform the stage into a theatrical big top.

Then there are the animals which arrive not through realism but through inspired puppetry. Rather than attempt literal representation, the production uses imaginative designs that capture each creature’s spirit. Lions and orangutans appear through stylized constructions that are charmingly suggestive of the real thing. Even better, the story’s emotional centerpiece, Rosie the elephant, emerges as a genuine triumph of theatrical illusion. Through graceful design and skillful puppeteering, Rosie becomes a character, and one whose fate matters.

At the heart of the story lies the uneasy triangle between Jacob, the circus’s beautiful equestrian Marlena (a highly appealing Helen Krushinski), and her erratic husband Augustus, the show’s volatile ringmaster (Connor Sullivan, who effectively makes his character unpleasant and clearly dangerous from the get-go). Keller’s Jacob brings a convincing and relatable innocence to the role, while Krushinski’s Marlena offers warmth and even strength as a woman who has learned to conceal her fear of her husband’s behavior. And it’s their shared affection for the animals that creates the emotional bridge between them. Yet even here the storytelling sometimes feels compressed.

The husband’s darker side, a crucial element of the novel’s tension, is somewhat softened, lending the musical a tone that feels less gritty than its source material. For those who know both the novel and the 2011 film, the theatrical result may come across as a version that occasionally seems more romantic than dangerous. Fortunately, animal abuse by the ringmaster is suggested more than seen. The musical score by indie folk band PigPen Theatre Co. contributes to that somewhat gentle tone.

The songs evoke the folk and Americana textures of the era, drifting between swing rhythms and acoustic ballads. Numbers like The Road Don’t Make You Young serve the storytelling well enough in the moment. But the music rarely achieves the kind of melodic lift that lingers in the memory afterward. The score does its job and voices soar, yet it seldom steals the spotlight from the visuals.

When the show builds toward its climactic circus chaos, the theatrical machinery roars thrillingly to life. The final upheaval, part spectacle, part emotional release, delivers the kind of pulse-quickening moment that reminds you why live theater can feel more electric than any other forum for telling a story.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS may not be a perfectly balanced musical, but as a piece of theatrical spectacle where acrobats fly and a circus flickers into life, it offers something undeniably magical. And if, as a child, you’d ever felt the urge to run away and join the circus, or at least spend two hours pretending you did, this touring production offers a generous invitation.

ASU Gammage -- https://www.asugammage.com/ -- 1200 S. Forest Avenue, Tempe, AZ -- 480-965-3434

Photo credit to Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade

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