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Video: LIFE OF PI Is Getting Ready to Take Center Stage on Broadway
May 17, 2024
Previews are underway for Lolita Chakrabarti's dazzling stage adaptation of Yann Martel's best-selling novel Life of Pi, running at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. BroadwayWorld caught up with the company before opening night and you can meet the whole gang in this video!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World. The five-time Olivier Award-winning
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best play, Life with Pi, is coming to Broadway. It'll open on March 30th here
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at the show in Feld Theatre, where we drop by to meet the company and give you a sneak peek at the dazzling puppetry
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Welcome to Broadway with Life with Pi. How excited are three of you
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So excited. All three of us are making our Broadway debut in this show, which is super cool
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Very exciting. This is all new and kind of nerve-wracking, to be honest, but it's great
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You are about to come to Broadway. You two are returning to Broadway. You're making your Broadway debut. How excited are you
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I'm super excited. It's really, there's a word in Tagalog called gigil, which means nervous excitement
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So it's like, it's like this feeling. Well let's talk about this. You switch out which animals you do each night in which position. Tell me about that
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So there are eight puppeteers, and there are six puppetry tracks in the show
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And so each of us knows two, sometimes three, sometimes more tracks. And so we
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have a team that we're mostly with in the tiger. So when that tiger team is on
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we're in that track. And then in our non-tiger nights, we're in another track
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where we do other puppets. And then occasionally we get a rest night, which is also really great. And that's sort of how we roll through
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You're both Olivier Award winners for your beautiful puppetry work in this show
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I mean, I love that the Oliviers give a puppetry award. Yeah, that was very special for us and all of the community of puppeteers. It
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was, to get that acknowledgement was very, very special. But also coming over here, realizing that it made waves over here as well
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that the awards being given was amazing. You know, it made history
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Yeah, it's stupendous. It's a special show because the story that Jan has written all those years ago
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is incredible. Right now, it speaks about so many things that we all need to
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be aware about, like immigration and love. And a lot of people are battling
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inner demons. And this story is about that, really, you know, how we can
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sort of face them and survive knowing that they're there and not let them
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eat you up. And it also makes you curious about things that you can't
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explain, whether it be God or whatever divine force that's around us
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There's so much to, like, unpack. And that's why I think I love it. And I
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think people, when they come to watch it, it won't be just a play that they
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see. And when they step out of the theater, they forget about it. I think
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it will be something that will sort of, like a spell, create a world of
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questions in them that they go on thinking about. What's made this so special for each of you
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I think it's the collective theater making that is happening on stage. It's a complete ensemble piece. Even though Pi is on stage the whole time
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we are all working together to create theater in a way that I don't think is done on Broadway very often. So it's lovely
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I'd echo the same thing. For me, of course, it's personally meaningful
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as it's my Broadway debut. But it's also, there are 10 South Asian Americans
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in the cast, and all of us, it's our Broadway debut. So for the strong
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South Asian representation, it's very special. Yeah, it's the epic storytelling, the feast of it all, the only way that
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you can really do this play. Talk about how much joy this is bringing to audiences already here in
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New York. We've had the most amazing response. I mean, what, we've done a week of
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previews, maybe less. And every single show, we've had standing ovations and gasps. So that's really thrilling, because then you know the
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storytelling's working. Yeah. One of my favorite things every night, apart from seeing the show, is I
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sit in the stage management office doing notes after the show, which is just above stage door. And as each actor walks out, I hear that amazing
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roar. We've got 17 folk making their Broadway debuts, and each of them
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is experiencing that for the first, that Broadway roar for the first time. And that's really thrilling
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So we took you through today, just one section, very short, one-minute
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section of the show, which we call the swimming tiger or the oar battle
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where the boy and the tiger have both fallen into the sea. And they're
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both vying to see who's going to end up on that lifeboat. And they sort of have, as the name describes, a battle with an oar between them. And
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we took you, in our little demonstration, we took you from what it would be like in the rehearsal process. So when we're working without
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even the puppet. So we had the boy, no weapon, no oar, and the three
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puppeteers operating the tiger. The next level that we showed you, we introduced the puppet, we introduced a weapon for the boy, and we started
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moving our revolve around as well. So you could see the intricacy of the choreography there, but it's still without lights and sound so the
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actors can communicate with each other so they can be safe. But then the final thing we showed you was a little snippet from the show. So we had
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video, light, sound, revolve, puppetry, action, all the rest of it
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