NEWCITY REVIEW: "War Horse" by Broadway in Chicago

Photo: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

The stage version of author Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel, “War Horse,” was met with mostly yawns and complaints about the show’s length on Tuesday night at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, where it opened in an oddly concise three-week run. A widely admired work of flash and heartfelt sentiment on Broadway, this national tour falls far short of its visually inspired original production’s ability to captivate and elicit big emotion from an audience. Now, the show drags along and underwhelms at every not-quite-happy-not-quite-sad lap.

What has changed? For one, it is constricted by a flat proscenium arrangement. The 2011 Tony Award winner for Best Play (originally directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris) enjoyed its adolescence at the National Theatre of Great Britain, a curved thrust stage forcefully jutting out into the audience—the same distinctive set-up of its Broadway home, the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. Director Bijan Sheibani has adjusted the original staging somewhat, but his alterations are limited to unfortunate reductions in scale. “War Horse” simply doesn’t befit a venue-to-venue tour. The herd of horses still trots in faraway circles and the thirty-four-person ensemble is huddled into distant upstage corners. With those inconsiderate restrictions, the show is adequately playing to, perhaps, the first ten rows of the massive 2,344 seat theater.