THREE MEN IN A BOAT

Playwrights Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon provide a gratifying change from the too-frequent, obviously profit-driven movie-to-musical adaptations that litter so many stages today with this clever portrayal of the behind-the-scenes experiences of the three principals in Jaws, one of the biggest commercial successes in film-making history and a source of much critical and social analysis. What begins as a claustrophobic comedy of egos evolves into a thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of masculinity and creative ambition.

Directed by Guy Masterson, North Shore Music Theatre’s production features Timothy W. Hull (Robert Shaw), Jonathan Randell Silver (Richard Dreyfuss), and Josh Tyson (Roy Scheider). Trapped on a small fishing boat for days on end while the film’s technical crew struggles to maintain or restore the mechanical shark, Bruce, to working order so filming can continue, the three battle boredom, insecurities, and competitiveness.

Shaw and Dreyfuss go after one another repeatedly with verbal barbs and insults. Scheider, the most level-headed of the three, plays the role of peacemaker. Shaw, who had a rich history as a Shakespearean actor by the time he filmed Jaws, couches his insults as lines from King Lear and Hamlet. Dreyfuss, relatively young, is wracked by sea-sickness and insecurities and his admiration for Shaw. Shaw, clearly jealous of a younger man of potential, tries to humiliate Dreyfuss by challenging him to athletic feats and pub games. At one point, Dreyfuss and Shaw can no longer contain their mutual rage and begin to wrestle, pulled apart only through Scheider’s efforts.

Just as the characters are filled with doubts about their own talents, they question the validity of having an acting career. They wonder whether acting is “womanish,” as one of them says Dustin Hoffman claimed. They recall their troubled relationships with their fathers, an interesting direction for their conversation given that one of the co-authors of the play, Ian Shaw, is the son of actor Robert Shaw. None of them expect the film they are working on to be successful, and given the repeated mechanical difficulties with the shark, one can hardly blame them.

While Jaws came out in 1975, filming was taking place in the summer of 1974, giving the characters opportunities to reflect on the scandals surrounding Richard Nixon and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Their comments on the newspaper articles of the time foreshadow our own present moment of national reckoning, one that arguably dwarfs that of the Watergate era.

Just as Jaws is famous for its music, the sound design (Adam Cork) here, while hardly as dramatic, is superb, conjuring the sea with perfectly calibrated sounds of wind, water, gulls, buoys so realistically that I had to confirm from time to time that the boat on the stage was perfectly still and not bobbing about on the water. The lighting (Jeff Greenberg) is also excellent, mirroring the inner turbulence of the characters with shifts in sun, clouds, and light, efficiently indicating the passing of days.

Again and again, as those days pass, the actors wonder about the point of the film. It’s about a shark, Shaw insists. Yet the play depicts Shaw’s struggle with Quint’s famous USS Indianapolis speech, based on a true World War II horror story about the ship tasked with delivering the components of the first nuclear bomb that would be dropped on Japan to a U.S. Navy base in the Pacific. Shortly after delivering the nuclear materials, the ship was torpedoed by the Japanese and sank, leaving nearly 900 men stranded in the open ocean, facing exposure and dehydration—and surrounded by sharks. In the film, this historic event is the origin story for the character Quint’s hatred of sharks, but Hull’s delivery of the culminating line of the play—“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” —leaves us to wonder: which was the greater horror—the sharks? Or nuclear devastation?

In The Shark is Broken, we see the origin stories of the actors who brought the ground-breaking Jaws to the screen. Just as Jaws turned a mechanical shark into an icon, The Shark is Broken turns the behind-the-scenes working of filmmaking into an exploration of the fragility of masculinity—and the potential threat of the need to perform acts of heroism.

photos by Paul Lyden Photography

The Shark is Broken
North Shore Music Theatre
54 Dunham Rd., Beverly, MA
Fri and Sat at 8; Sat & Sun at 2
ends on May 11, 2025
for tickets, call 978.232.7200 or visit NSMT

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston