Review: North Shore Music Theatre's THE SHARK IS BROKEN Looks Inside Jaws

In the summer of 1975, moviegoers flocked to theaters to see “Jaws,” the story of the hunt for a man-eating great white shark attacking beachgoers at a summer vacation spot, making the picture the first summer blockbuster.

Movie buffs know that the thriller – based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name and featuring a screenplay by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb – put director Steven Spielberg on the map and made composer John Williams’ ominous two-note musical refrain forever a sign of impending danger.

Less is known, however, about the off-camera relationships among the film’s three lead actors, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss. Now through May 11, at Bill Hanney’s North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, the play “The Shark Is Broken,” a clever and fascinating look at how the trio spent their downtime, is being given a two-thumbs-up rendering.

Written by British playwrights Ian Shaw, son of Robert Shaw, and Joseph Nixon, the play pulls back the curtain on movie history for a humorously insightful look at the behind-the-scenes drama that happened during the filming on Martha’s Vineyard in 1974. Well received UK and Toronto productions between 2019 and 2022 led to a Broadway transfer to New York’s John Golden Theatre for a limited run from August to November, 2023.

Guy Masterson, who has directed all prior productions – starring Ian Shaw as his father – is again at the helm of the current Beverly run, which features an all-new cast. Timothy W. Hull plays Shaw, with Jonathan Randell Silver as Dreyfuss and Josh Tyson as Scheider in the one-act exploration of what happened when the three very different actors, with very different personalities, were all but stranded on location while repairs were made to the real star of the film – Bruce, a mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s attorney.

When repairing Bruce takes longer than anticipated, the actors are left to their own devices to pass the time. Silver is a doppelganger for the then 27-year-old Dreyfuss, but he more than just resembles the actor. Silver captures the brooding, restless actor in all his distress with the Martha’s Vineyard weather, the production delays, his longing to be back in Brooklyn, N.Y., his drug use, and more. Tyson also closely resembles the rangy Schneider, shown here to be an inveterate newspaper reader who ably navigates the choppy waters stirred up by his fellow actors. And Tyson gets his own moment in the sun, demonstrating that good actors can also be eye candy.

Hull gives a perfectly calibrated performance as Shaw, the hard-drinking, Shakesperean-trained British actor who has more than a little in common with his character, Quint, the shark-hunting captain of the Orca. Other than being co-stars with unexpected free time on their hands, however, we see that Shaw and Dreyfuss have little in common except for the energy they derive from verbally poking at each other.

The razor-sharp writing by Nixon and the younger Shaw is showcased especially well in ongoing references to Robert Shaw’s friend Harold Pinter. In the play, Shaw dangles his mentions of Pinter in front of an intrigued Dreyfuss like catnip, and convulses in laughter when he takes the bait. The actors’ complaints about New England and the omnipresence of clam chowder on Vineyard menus will make even the most determinedly loyal local laugh.

Devout fans of the movie – and perhaps one, two, or even all three of its sequels – will take pleasure from the script’s mentions of actors Murray Hamilton, who played the mayor, and Lorraine Gary, who played Ellen Brody. Gary would go on to reprise her character in “Jaws 2 and “Jaws: The Revenge,” sitting out only “Jaws 3-D.”

And NSMT audiences will appreciate that the theater-in-the-round has been reconfigured for this more intimate, proscenium-style production. Duncan Henderson’s scenic design for the Orca interior and its immediate surroundings provides a solid sense of a film set, while Rebecca Glick’s costumes perfectly suit each character. Further enhancing the proceedings are Adam Cork’s sound design and original music, which includes a brief evocation of Williams’s Academy Award-winning score, and Jeff Greenberg’s mood-setting lighting.