'Big River' signed, sung on Broadway

NEW YORK, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- "Big River" has returned to Broadway as a Deaf West Theater production using sign language as well as the spoken and sung word to give the 1985 Tony Award-winning musical -- based on Mark Twain's novel, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" -- a surprisingly pleasing new dimension.

Deaf West, founded in North Hollywood, Calif., in 1991, was the first professional American Sign Language theater in the Western United States and its members include the deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing actors. Its 2001 production of "Big River" was heaped with awards and has been brought to Broadway's American Airlines Theater by the Roundabout Theater Company in association with the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

The last Broadway show to combine deaf and hearing actors was Mark Medoff's "Children of a Lesser God" in 1980. It was a play about deafness, but "Big River" is not. "Big River's" cast includes 7 deaf and 11 hearing actors, all of them using sign language that involves use of the hands and arms, facial expressions, and body language.

Most Broadway shows have scheduled performances with a sign interpreter to satisfy the needs of the deaf. But the almost choreographic use of hand-signing by the cast of "Big River" may be off-putting well into the first act, although it eventually seems so integral to the dramatic expression of the actors that it becomes an acceptable and even enriching theatrical experience.

The other aspect of the production that takes some getting used to is the teaming of speaking and non-speaking actors to provide a spoken and sung voice for the mute member of the team. For instance, the actor playing Mark Twain is the voice of Huckleberry Finn, and Huck's non-speaking father has a mirror image in a speaking actor made up to look just like him.

This works well enough, thanks to a theater stage's fascinating acoustical ability to bounce the voice of a speaking actor to a signing actor although they are often at opposite ends of the stage from each other, or one above another on a stage balcony. Sometimes the speaking actor is kept in shadow, so as not to detract from the signing actor, but at other times they appear together in the spotlight.

"Big River" was never any great shakes as a show despite the folksy score and lyrics by country-and-western songwriter Roger Miller, but it swept the Tony Awards 18 years ago because it was a lean year for musicals. The premiere Broadway production is best remembered for its splendid Mississippi River scenery and the charming performance of Daniel H. Jenkins as Huck, the bad boy with a heart of gold.

The river settings are gone, replaced by a stage full of book pages with original illustrations of Twain's world-popular 1884 novel, which are moved about to provide a background for a succession of scenes. But Dan Jenkins is still around, playing the role of Twain this time out as well as the speaking-singing doppelganger for the signing Huck, played by Tyrone Giordano.

Giordano is making an impressive Broadway debut. He makes the tousle-head teen-age Huck -- whose innate sense of justice leads him to help runaway slave Jim and accept him as a friend in spite of his color -- into a winsome, lovable character on the verge of promising manhood. Jenkins provides Huck with an impressive voice enriched by a thick Missouri twang, never better than when singing the show's anthem, "Waitin' For the Light to Shine."

Jim is played by Michael McElroy, a familiar Broadway performer who speaks his part and sings with an emotion-packed tenor that can raise goosebumps when it soars to exciting heights in the show's musical climax, "Free at Last." His only vocal matches are Gwen Stewart, whose radiant voice shines forth in a gospel number, "How Blest We Are," and Melissa van der Schyff, who gives a lovely accounting of the funeral lament, "You Oughta Be Here With Me."

The very talented Troy Kotsur and Lyle Kanouse double in the role of Huck's drunken father, Pap, and also play the role of Duke (with the voice of Walter Charles) and King, the team of con men who take over Huck and Jim and their river raft. They are probably the most amusing shysters to hit the New York theater since "The Black Crook" became Broadway's first musical hit in 1866.

Others giving outstanding performances, often in multiple characterizations, are Phyllis Frelich (a Tony Award-winner for "Children of a Lesser God") as Huck's love interest, Christina Ellison Dunams as a slave girl, Gina Ferrall as the Widow Douglas, and Michael Arden as a prematurely tall and immaturely goofy Tom Sawyer.

Jeff Calhoun's direction and choreography of this William Hauptman adaptation of Twain's novel are as smooth as silk. Ray Klausen's bookish set design is minimal but clever in suggesting a raft on a wide expanse of blue water with the aid of Michael Gillaim's rippling light design, and David R. Zyla's costumes are period perfect.

Music is provided by six on-stage musicians rather than a pit orchestra.