BRUCE, new musical about the making of Steven Spielberg's JAWS

Fixed link:

https://deadline.com/2022/03/jaws-musical-bruce-jarrod-spector-seattle-rep-theater-1234983246/#recipient_hashed=598ef19ae68f0d25fc9ef5f6b388ff107e8577493db5f392d0c6145bd4b2cd2d

Updated On: 3/21/22 at 02:24 PM

The Shark is Broken play has just completed its London run, is this new musical even necessary?

Seems an odd thing to musicalize, which intrigues me.

I listened to some demo recordings of this that were posted on YouTube a while back and really enjoyed it.

Found this on You Tube. AN interview with the creatives and a portion of what seems to be the final song in the show..



https://youtu.be/F5IqWkE6WYs

There is a week in June while this is on in which the tours for both The Prom & Pretty Woman are also playing Seattle. Might make for a cool little mini theatre trip for someone on the West Coast.

Seattle local, first time posting, some minor spoilers.

I was very excited to finally see this at Saturday’s matinee, been looking forward to for a while. Overall, Bruce is an entertaining show, if predictable and relatively slight. The behind-the-scenes drama behind the making of Jaws might seem inherently dramatic but the stakes just aren’t ever really there. Plus we know the ending; something that shouldn’t hamper a musical if all the elements are firing, but when only some of them are, or they’re firing intermittently, then it can feel like just going through the motions, which is where Bruce currently resides.

Performances: Good for the most part, but the characters are types, even if they are based on real people. Nobody has an arc or develops much. The only minor exception is Jarrod Spector as Spielberg who gets to show some different sides to the director, bouncing easily between boyish/enthusiastic/charming to unsure/freaking out under pressure. What Spector really delivers is an ability to hold everything together. You know the show is in assured hands with him at the helm.

Design: The production has two modes. The first involves a 3x3 grid unit meant to represent Hollywood, studio offices and such. It’s tall and dominates the whole stage. It works ok, but quickly you start wondering how and when things will "open up", which they eventually do, and the rest of the show, set at Martha’s Vineyard during filming, is played on the open stage. The flow of everything is fairly cinematic, lots of short scenes. No real choreography to speak of, and the main goal is just to manage traffic and keep things proceeding smoothly, which Donna Feore accomplishes between cast and set elements.

The material itself: Book is solid, workmanlike. Nothing surprising. Hits all the beats you’d expect. Definitely goes for the easy jokes, low hanging and obvious fruit. The music and lyrics for this show are fashioned less around individual songs and written more as sequences. For example, the opening number - probably titled something like “This Is The Big One” - doesn’t so much end as give way to the next cue. Oberacker and Taylor are going for a seamless effect, but at times the score can feel like a run-on sentence lacking satisfying punctuation. My favorite song was actually a relatively minor comic number for a pair of Australian shark experts who contributed footage early in the production of the movie; the incorporation of this duo for a single scene was silly and creative, an unexpected delight.

As for future prospects, I’m not sure. Bruce is a fun evening but that’s all. I don’t see how the creators can do much to fix this, besides polishing some dialogue and sharpening characterizations. The story is the story; they’ve made it as engaging as they can and the cast are game, but it just doesn’t find that spark. And no one’s to blame, the spark probably just doesn’t exist. I do applaud Seattle Rep for taking a huge swing with this show, continuing to prove how committed they are to developing big projects.

Updated On: 6/6/22 at 10:57 PM

There's no way this is coming to Broadway anytime soon.

This is a really weird topic to musicalize. That being said I am interested in hearing the score just out of sheer curiosity.

ACL2006 said: "There's no way this is coming to Broadway anytime soon."

Never once at any time was the moniker “Broadway-bound” ever used on this production so no one is looking at this as a pre-Broadway tryout of any kind.