New Broadway Play Goes Behind the Scenes of ‘Jaws’ — with a Twist

It’s nothing new for a musical to be based on a movie. But in the new comedy “The Shark Is Broken,” which officially opened on Broadway Thursday night, viewers are going back to 1975’s “Jaws” — but not in the way movie fans remember.

“The Shark is Broken” is co-written by and starring Ian Shaw, the son of the late Robert Shaw, who of course played ship captain Quint in the original blockbuster. In the play, Shaw portrays his own father alongside Broadway vet Alex Brightman as Richard Dreyfuss and Colin Donnell as Roy Scheider in a behind-the-scenes comedy based on the infamously difficult movie shoot.

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As cinephiles are aware, “Jaws” had a troubled production: shooting on the water proved more difficult than Steven Spielberg imagined, and the mechanical shark (nicknamed “Bruce”) frequently broke down. The 90-minute play imagines several days of the shoot when Dreyfuss, Shaw, and Scheider were stuck on a boat, shooting the shit, and often annoying the hell out of each other. Duncan Henderson’s set design will be instantly familiar to fans of the film — it’s perhaps the most famous boat this side of Titanic.

There are plenty of other callouts for lovers of the movie and Spielberg lore. There are references to future Spielberg projects (dinosaurs and aliens), as well as a few classic film lines, like the origin of “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” But thematically, it’s a sometimes-heavy comedy about reckoning with fatherhood; exploring trauma and the relationship between fathers and sons, made all the more poignant, of course, by Ian Shaw portraying his own dad.

A dramatic high point involves a recreation of Robert Shaw’s famous USS Indianapolis monologue, as he attempts to rehearse it. Ian is honoring his father’s work and talent, and wrestling with the complicated pain of legacy and love.

“I was nervous about [the show], because I felt that I was exposing myself to something that might be damaging emotionally,” Shaw told Playbill. “But it’s so interesting. When you do it, you quickly realize it’s not about you. It’s about all of us. We all have fathers, and traditionally that relationship is quite difficult to unpack. I found it quite liberating, personally, to actually go through that process by doing this.”

The show, directed by Guy Masterson and which will play in NYC until November, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, before transferring to the West End in 2021.

Funnily enough, this isn’t the only “Jaws”-related production going on right now. There is also a musical, “Bruce,” that premiered at Seattle Rep in 2022. That show “centers on a young Spielberg facing poor weather, dangerous water, hostile locals an exploding budget, endless delays and a highly dysfunctional Bruce to make “Jaws,” according to the AP.

“The Shark Is Broken” is now playing on Broadway.

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