For better or worse, while strolling through Manhattan’s theatre district these days, one inevitably gets the strange sensation of being in a movie theatre box office. Yes, Broadway is still very much live, and its marquee lights still flicker with the charm of Old New York, but the kinds of shows being produced are more directly plucked from cinema than ever before, and in diametric opposition to the stage-to-screen pipeline that brought us West Side Story, Grease, Hairspray, Chicago and Funny Girl. Now it’s Broadway that has movie fever, as evidenced by the recent productions of Spider-Man, Mean Girls, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Waitress. This fall, that trend reaches its apex – at the tippy-top of the Empire State Building, to be exact – with an expensive, refurbished and long-gestating theatrical adaptation of cinema’s favorite fable, King Kong.
Directed by the choreographer Drew McOnie, with a book by Jack Thorne, who is fresh off a triumphant Tony awards with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, King Kong represents a small step for musical theatre and one giant leap for animatronic design. The titular ape stands 20ft tall and weighs 2,000lb, with mournful, jet-black eyes, a sinewy build and skin, made of steel, fiberglass and inflatable airbags, that glistens like obsidian. He roars, too, discharging perhaps the single loudest sound to hit Broadway since Elphaba’s climactic yowl at the end of Wicked. When in the gorilla’s clutches, the aspiring actress Ann Darrow (Christiani Pitts) looks something like a toy figurine.
But despite how diminutive she and everyone else on stage looks relative to Kong, Darrow has been reimagined by McOnie and the show’s creative team as a big-hearted, outspoken warrior, often rebuking the sleazy movie director who brings her to Skull Island in a way Fay Wray, Jessica Lange and Naomi Watts couldn’t, each constrained by the film’s regressive gender dynamics. It was this, the opportunity to revamp the story, that attracted McOnie to the project.
“It’s been felt that this story has misrepresented a lot of cultures and communities, women and people of color in particular, and I’ve always strived to ask questions of myself and of the people I work with that can make a story feel like it’s asking important questions, too,” says McOnie, an Olivier award-winning choreographer whose main directorial experience before Kong was the West End adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s film Strictly Ballroom. “When I was first spoken to about doing the show I thought, ‘I can’t do this, this isn’t a story for me.’ And in looking into it it dawned on me that this is a story about two creatures, one of which can’t speak and the other who feels like she can’t be heard, doesn’t have any agency. I felt, maybe I am the person to try and turn this into a story that represents those people.”
That their relationship is forged through non-verbal communication makes sense given the director’s choreographic skill, on display in a slew of elaborate dance numbers which call to mind the vaudevillian sensibility of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film adaptation. Most impressive, however, is Kong himself, a hulking but lovable beast operated by 14 visible performers, not unlike the War Horse puppet or the angel in the recent stage production of Angels in America.
Created by the Australian production company Global Creatures and its spun-off animatronics division Creature Technology Co, Kong retains the dualities of prior film depictions, like the stop-motion animation gorilla of the legendary 1933 film and the ape-suited one of the romantic 1976 remake. Tender but emphatic, Kong’s effect is equal parts fearsome and tranquilizing; in this stage version, we come to see the kinship between Kong and Ann not as a study in opposites but in shared alienation. McOnie admits he and his team are the “last to the party”, but they’ve tried to both address and invert the almost 100-year-old notion of Darrow as the damsel in distress.
“We played into the iconography of the white dress, and it’s almost like our version of the musical is what the story always was but it’s been twisted in every movie and book ever since,” he says. “One of the key messages of the show is how you defy the box you’re born into. Your hand is chained by birth because of the way you look, or where in the world you come from, or your sexuality, and Kong teaches us how to roar back and defy the box society puts you in.”
But for all its timely political messaging, the central thrill of the musical is the creature itself, who draws rapturous applause when he first appears to Darrow and the director Carl Denham on Skull Island. Sonny Tilders, the creative director for Creature Technology Co and the man behind the remarkable puppetry in the arena-touring Walking with Dinosaurs, says “there’s nothing obvious about how to capture Kong”. Tilders considered making the beast hyper-realistic and fur-skinned before deciding instead on a marionette puppet that could clamber around the stage with the help of performers and microprocessors.
“One part of my brain said, this is theatre, we need to do what theatre does well, which is tackle things less literally and rely on your imagination to take you somewhere else,” says Tilders, who remembers watching the 1933 film version on weekends as a kid in his native Australia. Another source of inspiration was a photo his mother had of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God, surrounded by a coterie of warriors, much like Kong and the dancers who operate his limbs.
“It’s a beautiful thing, this willingness of the audience to suspend their disbelief,” he adds. “So we kicked around a bunch of ideas and Kong evolved from this idea of being less realistic. We wanted this lovely sculptural simplicity that epitomized strength and had beauty. So, ironically, the biggest decision we made aesthetically was to move away from fur.”
Before he made it to New York, Kong was stored in an industrial hangar in Melbourne, where a production of the show, staged in 2013, got lukewarm reviews. It was a few years later, in a big industrial warehouse, that McOnie first met the beast. Because of his “British sensibility”, he says, he prepared himself to be underwhelmed. The interaction, though, exceeded his expectations. “The thing that completely bowled me over was his eyes,” says McOnie. “There’s a weird quietness around him that’s hard to explain. It was a very emotional experience.”
One can sense this sympathy for King Kong in this new production, which to varying degrees of success attempts to update and rectify a tale that looms large in the collective conscience as a hallmark of cinematic ingenuity, a fantastical love story and a racist allegory. So large, in fact, that Merian Cooper, director of the 1933 original, felt compelled to say: “Kong was never intended to be anything but the best damned adventure film ever made.” But like so many Hollywood fables, King Kong has taken on a life of its own. And though he ultimately belongs on Skull Island, as Ms Darrow tells Mr Denham, he feels right at home in the concrete jungle.
King Kong is currently in previews at the Broadway Theatre and opens on 9 November
