Review: ‘Big Fish’ at Marriott Theatre promises eternal life but needs to more believe in itself
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Commercially successful theater usually promises audiences immortality. The message likely will be hidden by metaphor, but the idea of passing on yourself, and what you stand for, to future generations, of death merely being a change in form, is inextricable from the genre. It doesn’t matter if the show is set on the Serengeti, in revolution-strewn Paris or in Anatevka. That’s why people go to musicals; they just think it’s for the tunes.
“Big Fish,” the Andrew Lippa-scored musical that had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago back in 2013, is a show that understands that truth. I’ve had great affection for this piece, which was based both on the 1998 Daniel Wallace novel and the 2003 Tim Burton movie, not least because this fragile show found itself quickly (and unfairly) beached on Broadway, despite a warm-centered Alabama story, a beautiful score and luminous performances from Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz. So I am glad the Marriott Theatre is reviving a piece that surely will speak to many in this suburban theater’s loyal audience. I only wish Henry Godinez’s production, which has a stellar cast, plumbed more of the emotional depths of the work.
That’s not to say “Big Fish” does not have flaws in its book. It’s centered on a father and son, both longing to connect more fully than ever has been the case. An iconoclastic traveling salesman named Edward Bloom (Alexander Gemignani) has been a loving dad to his son Will (Michael Kurowski), but as the kid reaches adulthood, he becomes frustrated by how he was weaned on tall tales mostly featuring his father as the hero. The first scene of the musical involves Will, about to marry, declaring how his now-aging dad is like an iceberg because only a small percentage of him ever is visible.
And thus we join Will on this quest for knowledge even as we watch his father’s richly encapsulated stories unspool on the stage in flashbacks as he tells them to his boy. The show wants to keep you guessing about what is true here and what’s fiction, along with the corollary matter of whether, at the end of the day, the distinction actually matters. The stories have an edge to them: Edward has declared a lifelong love of wife Sandra (Heidi Kettenring), but he also speaks obliquely of an old girlfriend, Jenny (Allison Sill).
The show is hard to stage (Burton movies are not easy to adapt) and it presents both an overly passive female lead in Sandra and, in Will, a role that requires being mad at a fun dad for most of the show. That’s hard to pull off. Adding to the difficulties is Marriott’s cheap and confounding choice to produce the reduced 12-actor version of the show (half the cast of the original staging), meaning roles that used to be principals are now ensemble parts, which confuses the audience and spoils the show’s original structure. As a leading musical house, Marriott should be hiring more actors and giving its audiences the full monty.
Speaking generally, though, “Big Fish” only works if it accepts everything told by Edward Bloom as truth, at least in the storyteller’s eyes and that’s where this choppy, strident and overly stereotypical production struggles. Often it complicates everything needlessly: as one example, Kettenring sings the show’s most beautiful ballad, “I Don’t Need a Roof” as if the couple is in crisis and she needs to persuade her husband of her love; in reality, the couple already knows all of that and the song works best as a gentle, beautiful reminder of the surety of marriage.
That sweetness, that belief in the mythologies of life, that gentle sense of older and wiser people coming to terms with life’s disappointments and mysteries is what this production struggles to find, notwithstanding truly an A-list cast, including the luminous Kettenring and Gemignani (“Hamilton”), a recent Chicago-area arrival who will be a huge asset to our musical theater community. In the final few minutes, these gifted actors begin to find that quality, but it’s a long wait.
Still, the audience around me was clearly moved; I was struck by how many people clearly had forgotten the film now (time moves on) and, of course, “Big Fish” is a show about familial love and its capacity to make our exits less painful. That will always have power in the theater, even if I’m still waiting for “Big Fish” to get the production it long has deserved.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Big Fish” (2.5 stars)
When: Through March 19
Where: 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $59-$64 at 847-634-0200 and marriottheatre.com
