‘The Shark is Broken’ Review: Broadway Play About the Making of ‘Jaws’ is No Blockbuster

variety.com:

Trish Deitch Anything that has to do with Steven Spielberg’s award-winning 1975 film “Jaws” should be fun. After all, it’s a movie about the sudden appearance of a freakishly large, man-eating shark in a quaint New England vacation spot on a packed Fourth of July weekend, and the trio of men — a weathered shark hunter, an aquaphobic smalltown cop, and a strangely upbeat young scientist from Queens — who set out on the high seas in a dilapidated fishing boat to kill it.

It’s one part “Moby Dick,” three parts campy disaster film. But Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s play “The Shark is Broken,” which bills itself in its promo material as a “behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of ‘Jaws’,” is, under Guy Masterson’s direction, about as fun as a being stuck on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean for weeks on end with three tiresome men.

Which is the premise of the play: The mechanical shark is broken for weeks, and so actors Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are forced to relate to one another with a certain kind of boorish but uninteresting intimacy (they arm wrestle, have push-up contests, play bar games, compare resumes, get drunk, argue etc.) in the cramped cabin of a fishing boat while waiting for filming to begin again.

This might have been a fascinating portrait of male ego and insecurity, with real insights into the workings of Hollywood in the 1970s — now that would have been fun.