“While James’s ‘Beast’ is about life-denying emotional paralysis, this latest version focuses on the more active perils of promiscuity and its tedious cousin: commitment phobia...I was always happy to see the Beast, since it usually put a stop to the annoying dialogue and let Mr. Kander’s haunting, minor-key waltzes take over...The view of our leading lovers is blocked by a mountain of name-brand cultural baggage and cumbersome back stories."
Read more

“Adapted from a James novella in the sense that roadkill might be said to be adapted from a deer...The show squashes James’s elegant psychological study of repression into a vulgar, banal and laborious dance play. It has the guts to fail big, and those guts wind up everywhere...Long and wordless sequences of balletic dance...provide relief from the narrative...The respite is never enough. The beast is always there, lurking. The beast is in the play.”
Read more

“Sometimes beautiful, and often frustrating ‘dance play’...Despite the show’s attempts to take its audience places both romantic and dark, and despite Kander’s sweeping, often beautiful music, I fear I often felt resistant to its pull...The frustrating thing about Thompson, Kander, and Stroman’s take on James’s novella is that they reframe his study of nameless menace as an easier piece of psychology."
Read more

“Intriguing and semi-successful show...The dancing is strong and elegant. Dvorovenko is light on her feet and powerful. Yazbeck reeks ease and athleticism. But a twirling, leaping, posing chorus of women at times gets silly. As directed, Marcher's fear sometimes appears to be acute appendicitis. More distracting is clunky narration and dialogue that keeps interrupting the flow...Easy to admire for ambition, experimentation and fine performances, but it's a mixed bag."
Read more

“The cast is first-rate...But the bounty of talent counts for little in a tedious, inert piece that awkwardly shoehorns numerous dance interludes into a thin storyline...Dialogue is sparse...Dance sequences plentiful, but Stroman's ballet-inspired choreography quickly begins to feel repetitive...The overall effect is underwhelming, feeling constrained on the small stage. The same can be said of Kander's waltz-flavored score, which proves typically melodic but unmemorable.”
Read more

“While this creative team brings plenty of craft, the result is that of conventional artists straining to experiment. Tender slides into crass; subtlety jostles with overstatement. If Agnes de Mille unfurled a passion project, it might resemble this: pop-balletic passion that verges on pantomime silliness...That core triteness is never fully mitigated by swoony music or flashy dancing...Dance storytelling wedded to a talky book means that we grow over-informed about an already meager narrative."
Read more

“It's a disappointing miss...Rarely has a show with this amount of virtuosic dance moved so sluggishly...Some of that is endemic to the source material, which is about as thrilling as a collection of run-on sentences about wasted time can be...Marcher's story has the potential to shake the soul by turning the commonplace into the mythic. Regrettably, Thompson's treatment makes it feel more like a made-for-TV cautionary tale...At least there's decent underscoring to distract us."
Read more

"The vulgarization of the original material wouldn't matter if 'The Beast in the Jungle' had a life of its own, but, without the presence of song to act as a bridge between the dialogue and movement scenes, this is an awkward dance-drama hybrid...Most of the time, 'The Beast in the Jungle' plays like a musical for which somebody forgot to hire a lyricist...Time and again, 'The Beast in the Jungle' is undone by its leaden book, especially the framing device."
Read more