Currently running at Wyndam’s Theatre in West End, London, Life of Pi is set to perform on Broadway in 2023 spring. Yann Martel’s best-selling novel of the same title was adapted to theater by Lolita Chakrabarti and premiered in London in 2021, receiving five Olivier Awards which stand for annual theater awards celebrating world-class theater in London.
The previews of the new play Life of Pi will begin on March 9, 2023 at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre ahead of its opening on March 30, 2023. Before performing on Broadway, the play will have its North American premiere with American Repertory Theater at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from December 4 through January 29, 2023.
In a statement, playwright Lolita Chakrabarti said: “It has been such a privilege to adapt Yann Martel’s modern classic Life of Pi for the stage. It was daunting, creatively, exciting, and always collaborative. To be able to tell this story the way I imagined it, to create the world using my references and viewpoint has been an extraordinary gift.”
She added that she was beyond thrilled that they would bring that play to Broadway. “It is a beautiful, visceral, magical show, a story of survival which all of us can fundamentally relate to after the effects of the pandemic,” she commented.
Based on the Man Booker Prize-winning novel, and also inspiring an Oscar-winning film in 2012, Life of Pi is a story of the sole human survivor, Pi, stranded on a lifeboat with four animals, a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Royal Bengal tiger, after a ship sinks in the Pacific Ocean.
The stage adaptation uses intricate puppetry to bring the story’s animal characters to life, with the seven performers who play the tiger collectively awarded best actor in a supporting role at the Olivier Awards, The New York Time reviews.
In a review by theatre.co.uk, the play is praised with being “a clear team effort”, a manifestation of “serious theatrical craft and creative brilliance that results in images of hallucinatory beauty.” It is considered a gorgeous staging by adaptor Lolita Chakrabarti and director Max Webster, bearing the definitions of “vivid, witty, poignant and wondrous.”
In addition to being written and adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti, Life of Pi is directed by Max Webster, with set and costume design by Tim Hatley, puppet and movement direction by Finn Caldwell, puppet design by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, video design by Andrzej Goulding, lighting design by Tim Lutkin, sound design by Carolyn Downing, original music by Andrew T Mackay, and dramaturgy by Jack Bradley.
Casting for the play on Broadway has yet to be announced.
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