The Jungle Book

Goodman Theatre, Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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This “glittering jewel” of a show deserves a life long beyond its current world-premiere run, said Barbara Vitello in the Chicago Daily Herald. Because director Mary Zimmerman has adapted Rudyard Kipling’s tales of an orphan raised by animals with funding from the Disney Theatrical Group, it’s no surprise that she hewed closely to Disney’s 1967 film interpretation. Yet while you’ll probably recognize songs like “Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You,” one of the “supreme joys” of this production is hearing what music director Doug Peck has done with them. Mixing in such instruments as the sitar, veena, and tabla, he’s created a hybrid of Dixieland jazz and Indian folk music that lends the show a distinct energy.

Alas, Zimmerman’s “musically rich, visually splendid” production doesn’t prove consistently engaging as drama, said Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times. To be fair, getting Kipling’s short stories to coalesce into a coherent story can’t help but be challenging. But Zimmerman’s sluggish first act “doesn’t really spring to life” until the appearance of Kevin Carolan as Baloo, the bear who takes orphaned Mowgli under his wing. The tale also hasn’t been cleansed of its racist undertones, said Kris Vire in Time Out Chicago. Anyone made queasy by the film’s jive-talking orangutan, King Louie, won’t be any more comfortable with the version played by Tony nominee André De Shields. And the 11th-hour arrival of several Hindu gods doesn’t make amends for Kipling’s condescending attitude toward Indian culture. It “comes across as a tokenist nod.”

But the music and art of India color much of the show; their presence is “one of Zimmerman’s most notable achievements,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. And whatever might be objectionable about the character of King Louie, De Shields makes the swinging simian a showstopper. The real problem is that Zimmerman and her collaborators “don’t yet seem to understand that The Jungle Book fundamentally is a coming-of-age story.” While Akash Chopra makes an adorable Mowgli, he doesn’t seem any older or wiser by the final curtain. “That’s what is missing, along with the sense of the loss that invariably accompanies the changes that befall us in life.”