Colin Donnell, Ian Shaw, and Alex Brightman in The Shark Is Broken. Photo: Matthew Murphy

It’s summer 1974. The shoot for Jaws, which will, the following year, become the prototype for the summer blockbuster film and briefly hold the title for highest-grossing film of all time (only to lose it to Star Wars), is dragging on. Two of the three leads (Quint and Hooper, the roles played by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss) were cast barely a week before the shoot began, but now, the cast and crew have been filming for months, most of that time spent on a boat, and the end is not yet in sight. And the shark is broken. Again. 

The Shark Is Broken, coming to Broadway via the Edinburgh Fringe and London’s West End, is only glancingly about the broken mechanical beast called Bruce, as delightfully odd as it is to hear a monologue in which Roy Scheider expounds on the difference between hydraulic and pneumatic power. But the broken shark is often the reason why the film’s three stars, Robert Shaw (played by his son Ian), Scheider (Colin Donnell), and Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), are spending so much time in the cramped cabin of the Orca, which serves as a seafaring green room when they’re not shooting in it. (Designer Duncan Henderson’s picture-perfect set, backed by Nina Dunn’s semicircular video seascape, so precisely scaled that its movement is sometimes sufficient to induce a little seasickness, instantly reminds of the time and place.) 

The humor of the piece lies in trying to capture a moment when cinema stopped being art and started being product, when the blockbuster began to launch the sequel and the sequel the franchise until, well, here we are with a Broadway comedy piggybacking on the behind-the-scenes drama of the movie that launched it all–and that comedy is pretty incomprehensible without its in-jokes, allusions, and metatextual references to everything we know about Jaws, everything we know about the fifty intervening years of pop culture, and everything we know about Shaw, Dreyfuss, and Scheider in those iconic roles. But the jokes are mostly built on a feigned prescience. We know how successful Jaws will be, and what its sequel was like; we know Richard Dreyfuss will keep acting; we even know what Scheider is foreshadowing in a speech about Nixon’s resignation, and we’re laughing at what they don’t know. (To be fair, the show was written in 2018, and if they haven’t updated it since, they do get some credit for foresight in the accuracy of some of the Nixon lines: “This nation’s constitutional form of government is in serious jeopardy if the President – any President – is to say that the Constitution means what he says it does, and that there is no one, not even the Supreme Court, to tell him otherwise…”)

But if you’re coming to the play for backstage scuttlebutt, getting behind the scenes of what it felt like on that epically disastrous film shoot, you’re probably going to emerge disappointed; you don’t get much more gritty detail than you’d learn from the film’s Wikipedia entry. And while there’s enjoyment aplenty to be found in watching Shaw, Donnell, and Brightman try to strike the balance between imitating the actors they’re portraying and building their own characters out of them, Shaw and Nixon as writers, and director Guy Masterson, have built the characters a little too schematically: Shaw is larger-than-life, full of the grandiloquent speech and the grand gesture; Dreyfuss is a neurotic, shallow mess; Scheider an even-keeled rationalist trying to make peace between the other two while sharing an interesting tidbit of information every few minutes. (The half-serious battleground between Shaw and Dreyfuss has its moments; one of the play’s funniest sequences, to me, was Shaw setting up Dreyfuss to enrage Harold Pinter, and Dreyfuss lapping up every bad piece of advice.) Shaw’s vice is booze, Dreyfuss’s coke, Scheider’s cigarettes and tanning. Toward the end of the play, the three muse on what Jaws is really about. For the self-absorbed, angsty Dreyfuss, it’s about the subconscious. For the pragmatic Scheider, it’s about responsibility. And for the bombastic, hard-living Shaw, well, it’s about the fucking shark. 

And it feels like what The Shark Is Broken is really about is father-son relationships, starting with Ian Shaw reckoning with the legacy of his father: his alcoholism, his complicated relationship with his own father, his ambivalence toward fame, his love for his “brood” of nine children. In keeping with the schematic nature of the character setup, all three characters need to have a moment to bond over the failures of their own father-son relationships: Dreyfuss’s father walked out the family; Scheider’s was a violent racist; Shaw’s, a country doctor and alcoholic, committed suicide when Shaw was twelve. 

Outside of the father-son stuff, there’s not much there, just a lot of winks and nods to what will be: a landscape of sequels and remakes and sequels to remakes. The Shark Is Broken might be a slightly different take on the theme in a Broadway recently populated by musical versions of Back to the Future and Waitress and Almost Famous, Wicked–which is about to become the movie based on the musical based on the novel–and The Notebook, the musical based on the movie based on the novel, but it’s not stepping outside that ecosystem. In a Fringe venue, with a beer in hand and six more shows to see before supper, I’m sure it had a scrappier charm. On Broadway, it feels a little like one more example of the thing it claims to be critiquing.