“Just join the circus like you wanted to,” P.T. Barnum implores in the 1980 Broadway musical Barnum. A young man named Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student who has just suffered a tragedy, does just that in Sara Gruen’s best-selling 2006 novel Water for Elephants.
Now, almost two decades after the novel’s publication, it has been adapted into a Broadway musical, directed by Jessica Stone and featuring a score by PigPen Theatre Co. Grant Gustin, Isabella McCalla, Gregg Edelman, and a host of real-life circus performers star at the Imperial Theatre.
Gruen and the show’s librettist, three-time Tony Award nominee Rick Elice, recently spoke about the challenges of musicalizing the novel, what they learned from their pre-Broadway tryout in Atlanta, and what message audiences might take away from the show...READ MORE