NEW YORK — Oceans — let alone lethal Bengal tigers on lifeboats — are usually a nightmare for Broadway; just look at the trouble Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” had in going under the sea. But in the 2019 stage version of “Life of Pi,” which was scripted by Lolita Chakrabarti, debuted in Sheffield, England, and opened on Broadway last week at the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre, the illusion of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel’s fateful voyage comes to life in director Max Webster’s production with so much visual panache and such phenomenal puppeteering that you’d swear his little boat is bobbing on ravenous waves with death awaiting him with each rise of the sun.
As fans of Ang Lee’s 2012 movie well know, 16-year-old Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) attempts a voyage from Pondicherry, India, to Canada on a Japanese cargo ship with his zoo-owning family, only for all creatures great and small to be catapulted into the Pacific Ocean during a terrible storm. Most all perish. But Pi survives on a lifeboat for 227 days. And he does so in the company of one “Richard Parker,” a Bengal tiger for whom he is the most logical — heck, eventually the only — choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“The Life of Pi” involves the title character recounting a wild tale indeed: Richard Parker hardly was Pi’s only four-legged aggressor on the high seas. It’s like watching something by Rudyard Kipling or Robert Louis Stevenson without the colonialist baggage.
