A sideshow of slavery and slapstick, “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at the Mercury theater is an exquisitely-performed yet completely unnecessary dusty corpse of musical theater that has been tragically exhumed, reanimated, and forced to dance a tortured jig.
Mercury, a theater with a reputation for staging excellent work, would have done well to leave this piece, first staged in 1984, in the dustbin of history. In 2023, there are better works to stage.
