TT: Toothless Tiger

It’s back to business as usual on Broadway: I do the job on Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re a movie star, you can do pretty much anything you want on Broadway. You can make your stage debut there, regardless of whether you’ve ever performed in front of an audience. You can be the leading man in a musical, despite the pesky fact that you’ve never sung anywhere but in your shower. You can even finagle a bunch of producers into putting up the cash to mount an ostensibly serious new play, the kind that normally wouldn’t have a chance of opening anywhere near Times Square. Which explains the unlikely presence on Broadway of Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” a symbolic drama about the horrors of the war in Iraq that has just transferred to New York from the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles with a single cast change: Robin Williams is making his Broadway debut in the title role….
Mr. Williams’ tiger is a foul-mouthed comedian-predator who is shot to death by Kev (Brad Fleischer), a loutishly stupid American soldier, when he bites off the hand of Tom (Glenn Davis), Kev’s corrupt buddy. The tiger’s ghost then wanders the streets of Baghdad circa 2003, in the process rubbing shoulders with other ghosts, among them that of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son (Hrach Titizian). In between these spectral encounters, we meet various other Iraqi citizens, all of whom are compromised to the degree that they have been forced to do business either with the Hussein family or the U.S. armed forces. We are, in short, in the shadowy land of moral equivalence, that mysterious domain where God is dead, life is absurd and everyone is no damn good.
Might it be possible to write a first-rate play about the war in Iraq that proceeds from these assumptions? Absolutely. The animating premise of “Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo” is clever enough, and the script is structured skillfully. The trouble is that the play so rarely says anything unpredictable. It is, to be sure, a trifle unexpected that Uday should be unapologetically portrayed as a slick, Westernized monster of the will who tortures and kills because he feels like it. But to make both soldiers cartoonish Ugly Americans is too easy by half…
Mr. Williams’ performance is equally predictable, but it’s not his fault, for he’s playing the tiger as written: The script calls for a superficial Hollywood-style performance, and he obliges…
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Read the whole thing here.