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King Kong on Broadway reviews round-up : 'One of the most ludicrous musicals in recent memory'

The new show, which opened on Thursday night, is based on the 1933 film – and involves a giant gorilla puppet

Clémence Michallon

New York

Friday 09 November 2018 18:24 GMT

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King Kong on Broadway - Preview

The reviews are in for the new King Kong Broadway show – and critics have been left thoroughly disappointed by the $35m reinvention of the 1933 film.

King Kong, which opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theatre, takes place in 1931 amid the Great Depression.

In this version, written by Jack Thorne, the Tony-winning author of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Ann Darrow is a young actress whose dreams "reach as high as the just-completed Empire State Building".

Darrow is faced with a difficult choice when filmmaker Carl Denham (who swears he can make her a star) plots to capture the 20-foot-tall, 2,000-pound Kong to display him in New York City.

While the use of a puppet for the giant ape – and the mastery of the animatronic team – have been met with praise from critics, reviewers weren't impressed with the show's plot, characters, and tunes.

Here's what the reviews have said so far (spoiler warning):

The Guardian

1/5

The book by the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playwright Jack Thorne, the score by Marius de Vries and the songs by Eddie Perfect, under Drew McOnie’s direction, provide a clumsy retread of the 1933 movie though now with a less coded racism, less coded rape and fewer anxieties about the tension between primitivism and modernity. What’s left? A show that makes breathlessly little sense and is rarely even fun. The people who brought you Walking with Dinosaurs have now brought you Lumbering with Primates. This is less a musical than an amusement park ride perpetually needing repairs, a feat of projection design (Peter England) with occasional dance breaks. (Alexis Soloski)

The New York Times

(Negative)

A car wreck of clichés like that simply can’t put a feminist story across meaningfully. Or any story, really — and that’s a bigger problem than the bad score and sluggish 20-foot marionette. I find it hard to believe that the book is by Jack Thorne, who won a Tony Award last season for writing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Jesse Green)

(Mixed)

I won’t give away details of the beast’s mighty, fatal fall, except to say that it works until it doesn’t. McOnie and Thorne make the mistake of taking the story a beat too far, ending the musical on a note of Ann’s self-empowerment. That’s nice and all, but there’s a big, dead gorilla somewhere out there who isn’t feeling so empowered. King Kong once again turns Disney Princess, when what’s wanted is a Scream Queen. (Greg Evans)

Los Angeles Times

(Negative)

The gender politics are an incoherent mix of the old and the new. Ann (Christiani Pitts) is transformed from a passive victim into an ambitious starlet who still has a heart of gold even though she’s willing to compromise her conscience at every turn for the chance of becoming “Queen of New York”. This is the title of one of the show’s highly derivative musical numbers that could be imported directly into the next Forbidden Broadway spoof.

Even when the songs by Eddie Perfect jibe with the story, they rarely make emotional sense. King Kong doesn’t simply come up short as a stage translation of a landmark horror film. It actually manages to fit around this failure one of the most ludicrous Broadway musicals in recent memory. (Charles McNulty)

(Positive)

King Kong, the creature, is a truly marvellous feat – of design, of engineering, of choreography, of performers and operators and stage managers functioning at bomb-diffusion levels of precision – and King Kong, the show is, beyond its spectacle, generic. It’s an amped-up blockbuster with largely forgettable songs, many of them of the belt-and-inspire variety. It’s thunderous and technologically impressive, carefully calibrated to contemporary sensibilities (ie, it’s hooked up to an IV of girl power), and as slick and shiny as an oil spill. As with, say, Space Mountain, the idea is just to go along for the ride. (Sarah Holdren)

2/5

The truly frustrating thing about King Kong is the waste of it all. Why did this story, whose central figure necessarily cannot sing, need to be a musical at all, much less one that suggests a late-run Simpsons parody? Have the success of War Horse and Thorne’s own Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – and the bellyflops of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour – taught us nothing? King Kong looks down on its huckster villain, film director Carl (Eric William Morris, overplaying an unplayable role), for taking an awesome creature and surrounding it with mediocrity for a gawking New York audience – but that’s exactly what this production does itself. In the sad eyes of the second act’s chained and stooped Kong, you see flickers of a show that might have been. (Adam Feldman)

Entertainment Weekly

(Mixed)

In a moment before the end of Act 1, Carl realizes people won’t believe Kong exists unless they see him with their own eyes. “He’s not a film,” he declares. “I thought about it all wrong — he’s theatre.” It’s a meta moment, because he’s right: The Kong puppet is an impressive feat you’ll need to see for yourself. The rest of the show, though, doesn’t command that sort of attention. (Jessica Derschowitz)

The Coen brothers films — ranked

Show all 17

1/17The Coen brothers films — ranked

The Coen brothers films — ranked

17. The Ladykillers (2004)

The first film in which Joel and Ethan Coen shared both producing and directing credits; previously Joel had always been credited as director and Ethan as producer. A largely pointless remake of the classic Ealing comedy, this has some funny moments and Tom Hanks gives a committed performance in the Alec Guinness role – but one can’t help but wonder why they bothered.

Touchstone Pictures

The Coen brothers films — ranked

16. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

The film that preceded 'The Ladykillers', this was the siblings’ first job as writers-for-hire. Tapping into a similar vein of screwball comedy to Preston Sturges's work in the Forties, it has a formidable cast: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Geoffrey Rush are excellent. Yet this is a rare Coen comedy that does not stand up to a repeat viewing.

Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock

The Coen brothers films — ranked

15. Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Audiences felt misled by 'Hail, Caesar!' due to its panoply of Hollywood stars and laugh-heavy trailer. The result was a huge discrepancy in enjoyment between the critics and the punters. A love letter to the golden age of Hollywood, this is one of their lighter efforts, but some of the recreations of film styles of yore are dazzling.

The Coen brothers films — ranked

14. Burn After Reading (2008)

This one finds the lads in a playful mood: a spy caper populated with idiotic characters portrayed by the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich (the latter’s pronunciation of “memoir” is a highlight). The plot is less important than the dialogue, characterisation and jokes. Pitt shows a real aptitude for comedy as a dim-witted fitness instructor.

The Coen brothers films — ranked

13. True Grit (2010)

Some see 'True Grit' as a poor man’s 'No Country for Old Men', but this is a more faithful adaptation of the Charles Portis novel than the John Wayne version. The Coens, so often accused of cynicism, have rarely produced anything more heartfelt. Hailee Steinfeld, in her breakthrough role, is staggeringly good as a teenager attempting to avenge the murder of her father.

REX

The Coen brothers films — ranked

12. Miller’s Crossing (1990)

There are those who consider this gangster flick — released in the same year as Scorsese’s 'Goodfellas' — to be the Coens' peak achievement. Slow and contemplative, the film contains two of the greatest moments in the entire Coen filmography: John Turturro in the woods and Albert Finney under the bed. Scorsese would later direct the pilot episode of 'Boardwalk Empire', a television show with more than a hint of 'Miller’s Crossing'.

20th Century Fox

The Coen brothers films — ranked

11. Raising Arizona (1987)

The opening 11 minutes of the Coens’ sophomore effort — before the title even appears — is one of the most beautiful, hilarious and perfectly executed sequences in modern cinema. Nicolas Cage didn’t enjoy the experience of making 'Raising Arizona' since the filmmakers allow their actors very little leeway in terms of improvisation. Holly Hunter has rarely been better and this contains some of the funniest Coen scenes.

20th Century Fox

The Coen brothers films — ranked

10. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

The Coens attempt at a family film (“you know, for kids”) that was expected to make waves at the box office but proved a flop, perhaps partly as a result of its idiosyncratic title. This is a comedy with shades of Sturges and Frank Capra. The flashback involving the tailor might be the most perfect gag in the entire Coen canon.

Universal Pictures

The Coen brothers films — ranked

9. Barton Fink (1991)

John Turturro stars as Barton Fink, a playwright attempting to write a screenplay in a deserted hotel while wrestling with his demons and/or John Goodman. Sharp, with a good dose of pathos, it deservedly won the Palme d'Or in 1991. That the Coens decided to make a film about writer’s block while they themselves were struggling to complete 'Miller’s Crossing' means there's a personal element to it, too (“I’ll show you the life of the mind," says Goodman's Charlie Meadows).

The Coen brothers films — ranked

8. A Serious Man (2009)

A favourite with fans, this begins in a 19th-century Eastern European shelter and ends with the disclaimer that “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture”. In between, we are treated to the Coens’ most personal film, pitched somewhere between the 'Book of Job' and Saul Bellow’s 'Herzog'. Michael Stuhlbarg is mesmerising as a Minnesotan physics professor who sees his life fall apart in 1967.

Focus Features

The Coen brothers films — ranked

7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

The title may be a reference to Sullivan’s Travels, and the plot inspired by Homer's 'The Odyssey', but this is an astonishingly original musical that stands as the most joyous film in the siblings’ filmography. The soundtrack won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and this sepia-tinted tale of convicts on the run during the Great Depression never fails to lift the spirits.

Touchstone/Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

The Coen brothers films — ranked

6. Blood Simple (1984)

The maverick filmmakers burst onto the scene with one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of the medium. Shot in just eight weeks, this is a startlingly violent neo-noir with moments of pure horror and that streak of bleak fatalism that would become a recurring theme.

The Coen brothers films — ranked

5. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Quite possibly the film of the decade, 'Inside Llewyn Davis' stars Oscar Isaac as a folk singer struggling to make ends meet in and around the Greenwich Village scene of 1961. For anyone who’s ever embarked on a creative pursuit and was worried that talent alone might not be enough, this is more terrifying than any horror.

The Coen brothers films — ranked

4. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

The Coens most underrated film, 'The Man Who Wasn’t There' was inspired by a poster showing various haircuts from the 1940s that the brothers came across while shooting 'The Hudsucker Proxy'. Billy Bob Thornton has never been better than he is playing Ed Crane, a quiet barber who suspects his wife of having an affair and becomes embroiled in the kind of classic noir perfected by Billy Wilder.

Working Title/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

The Coen brothers films — ranked

3. No Country for Old Men (2007)

A crime classic cut from the same cloth as 'Fargo' and 'Blood Simple', this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars. It is the Coens’ most taut film and their most critically acclaimed this century. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh is a cinematic villain for the ages.

The Coen brothers films — ranked

2. Fargo (1996)

Deftly blending comedy and horror, this timeless crime caper propelled the Coens into the mainstream and spawned a widly successful television series. The screenplay won an Oscar; so, too, did Frances McDormand (wife of Joel) for her terrific performance as the pregnant police chief investigating a double homicide in Minnesota, birthplace of the filmmakers.

Gramercy Pictures

The Coen brothers films — ranked

1. The Big Lebowski (1998)

Creedence. White Russians. Bowling. We end where we began, and while some will argue that the Coen brothers have made deeper, wiser and worthier films – that’s just, like, their opinion, man. This is their funniest work and, after a lacklustre reception, its reputation has grown to the point where it is now the quintessential cult movie. More importantly, for large swathes of us, it is absolutely guaranteed to ensure a good mood. The film, like its hero and the brothers behind it, abides.

Rex Features

(Positive)

After an earlier production in Australia and with the addition of a largely new creative team, the producers (led by Global Creatures) of this $35m Broadway epic, based on the classic 1933 film, have re-envisioned the story in striking theatrical terms, using dazzling projections, super-sized puppetry and lush underscoring to create one thrill ride of a show. Topping the list of visual wows is the magnificent, moving and oh-so-expressive title character who, alas, is not eligible for a Tony. (Frank Rizzo

The Hollywood Reporter

(Mixed)

This is a rare time I can honestly say that while King Kong the musical is a wretched mess, I would recommend King Kong the stage spectacle. "He's not a film," exclaims Carl Denham in a moment of revelation from the megalomaniacal movie director, a vanilla villain in Eric William Morris' insipid performance. "I thought about it all wrong. He's theatre!" That might not be 100 per cent accurate, but either way, the ape is simply amazing. (David Rooney)

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