Review: ‘The Shark Is Broken’ Takes a Very Funny Bite Out of ‘Jaws’

First, all Jaws fans be fair warned: there is no shark in Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s excellent Broadway play, The Shark Is Broken (Golden Theatre, booking through November 19). The only semblance of the iconic 1975 serial killer and wanton dismemberer of unfortunate swimmers are a few seconds of familiar forbidding music and the sight of that fin scything through Nina Dunn’s watery video design that forms the backdrop to the stage. Then we see that fin blowing up and sinking.

The image of the imploding fin crystallizes the focus of this 90-minute, intermission-less play: the tensions and clash of personalities between the three leads of the movie—Robert Shaw (played by his son Ian Shaw), Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell)—as filming is constantly delayed by the malfunctioning model sharks, nicknamed “Bruce” after director Steven Spielberg’s lawyer Bruce Ramer, that the production utilized. Only one “Bruce” reportedly remains intact, and it is housed at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

The play, directed with a guileful brevity by Guy Masterson, is, in one sense, intensely personal because of Shaw’s writing and performance. He looks so like his father, and the play both shows Shaw Sr. as a very funny, pugnacious, grizzled-way-too-young character actor, and also a bellicose, alcoholic bully, who guzzles booze, holds forth, seethes, and—in quieter moments—reveals the private pains hidden behind his sulfurous exterior.

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