‘Big River’ eagerly awaits its sign from Broadway

Early in the musical “Big River,” the slave Jim persuades a hapless Huckleberry Finn to come with him on a raft up the Mississippi to the free states. Examining his own palm, Jim predicts that Huck will experience “considerable trouble and considerable joy” if he comes along.

That also could describe the challenge this musical presents to New York theatergoers: to try something new, and perhaps a little difficult, to get something unique and quite wonderful.

For the first time, New York audiences are being invited to watch 18 hearing and deaf actors sing, speak, dance and sign their way through a 2 1/2-hour musical. Huck, played by deaf actor Tyrone Giordano, uses American Sign Language for all his dialogue and songs while Daniel Jenkins, sitting on the edge of the stage dressed as Mark Twain, gives voice to his hand motions.

During the next weeks, it will become clear whether this unusual form of theatrical expression can make it on Broadway. Will it be seen as a tiring gimmick, or will it bring a new understanding and aesthetic -- an almost balletic element -- to Twain’s literary classic?

And there could be one other challenge -- or, put more bluntly, strike -- against “Big River.” It’s a California import. New York theatergoers are notoriously indifferent to regional theater, shunning shows that win Pulitzers and effusive praise on the other side of the country.

But the creative forces behind “Big River” are betting that this reincarnated-revival-come-East has something special to offer and will live long on Broadway.

“I’d like to believe that a good show transcends geography and everything else, but I’ll admit I’m nervous in New York,” said Jeff Calhoun, who has been director-choreographer of “Big River” in all its California incarnations. First, the “new” version -- the 1985 Tony-winning hit remixed with sign language -- debuted in fall 2001 at the 65-seat Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood. A year later the show moved to the larger Mark Taper Forum with its built-in subscriber audience. Last week, it opened, under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company, at a big-marquee theater on 42nd Street at 7th Avenue.

Calhoun, a well-known Broadway figure, knew there were risks involved -- including that all the signing and stage-side voicing might take some getting used to, particularly for finicky New Yorkers. “It’s like a very uncomfortable blind date, but then 2.5 hours later you’re in love,” he said. During a preview performance, Calhoun noticed a couple walking out early in the first act. He followed them to the lobby to inquire why. It’s just not for us, they told him. “They just weren’t willing to go through it,” Calhoun says. “I hope they’re in the minority.”

Wary of impatient New Yorkers, Calhoun cut 15 minutes of the show, icing songs that distracted from the plot and reworking scenes that enhanced it.

It’s not that Los Angeles audiences aren’t discriminating or more willing to try something new, he said. But Angelenos knew what they were getting into. This production was Deaf West’s third musical; when it got to the Taper, the show had a reputation as a hit.

Here, tourists often hear little about a show before they decide whether to spend $91.25 on a ticket to “The Phantom of the Opera” or “Big River.” Which is why the reviews that came out Friday and the publicity carry such weight. Almost all the critics liked “Big River.” The Daily News headline called it a “Huck-uva show”; a local television reviewer compared its choreography to the dancing in “Lion King” and the overall innovation to “Nicholas Nickelby.” The all-important New York Times review, from start to finish, was a rave, even declaring that the show “makes the crucial point that there’s more than one way to tell a story and to sing a song.”

This helps.

The glowing reviews may even guarantee that the musical becomes what Roundabout artistic director Todd Haimes calls “a must-buy” ticket that draws a mass audience.

“If it’s not perceived as a sexy-production, you can tell in the first couple of weeks after the reviews,” Haimes said. “And then it won’t move to another Broadway house after the Roundabout run.”

Staging the production at the nonprofit Roundabout, with its built-in audience of 40,000 subscribers and successful record of reviving such shows as “Cabaret” and “Nine,” was important to ensure that no matter what the reviews said, “Big River” would run in New York for at least 14 weeks.

Like the Taper’s subscribers, Roundabout subscribers are sophisticated theatergoers willing to try something new, according to Haimes: “If somebody had said to me I want to do the first deaf musical at the Roundabout, it almost sounds ridiculous. A deaf musical? But since the production had already been up in California and they had done it so beautifully -- I’d like to say I was being heroic, but clearly they had done something extraordinary that my subscribers would like.”

At a recent performance Larry Nadler, a corporate recruiter from Long Island, and his friends had no idea, until halfway through the first act, that what they were watching was extraordinary. “It didn’t dawn on me that Huck wasn’t singing for a long time,” Nadler said. “Once I got into it, however, I thought it was really special.... I loved it.”

The producers plan to add a Playbill note explaining that the actors are using American Sign Language so tourists, who constitute a large portion of most New York audiences, fully appreciate what is happening on stage.

Michael McElroy, who the reviews singled out for his evocative performance as the runaway slave Jim, says the use of sign language -- and the facial and body language that surrounds it -- adds a new dimension to the play. Just as Twain’s epic has always drawn Americans into Huck’s world of loneliness and Jim’s world of enslavement, this new version goes another level, luring theatergoers, as well, into the world of the deaf.

“I’m not just playing a slave, I’m playing a slave that signs,” said McElroy, a New York actor who didn’t know the language before he landed the part. “You never know how New York audiences will react to something like that. But this is certainly worthy, something worth trying to reach them with.”

Clearly, the New York producers, backers and reviewers got past the “considerable trouble” to find “considerable joy” in this deaf musical.

Now it’s up to the tour-bus crowd to make the journey, if this reinvented story of Huck and Jim from the West is going to be a commercial success on Broadway.