Director Jessica Stone Goes Big with Water for Elephants But Doesn’t Forget the Heart

Jessica Stone made her Broadway directorial debut with last season’s Tony Award-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo, displaying her talents for delicacy, specificity and just-right levels of sentiment. She’s kept all of those tools handy, but Water for Elephants, running just across the street from Kimberly at the Imperial Theatre, demands a different bag of tricks. In Stone’s own words, “The minute you introduce a train and a stampede and an elephant, you’re just in different territory than sweet Kimberly Levaco’s living room.”

Kimberly Akimbo, ending its run at the Booth Theatre on April 28, traces the inner churnings of a late-‘90s teen who’s running out of time to experience all life has to offer. Water for Elephants, meanwhile, tells a story of mythic proportions, centered around a circus troupe traveling the country during the Great Depression (the musical is scored by PigPen Theatre Co. with a book by Rick Elice). Of course, there’s also simple a human story at the heart of the show: “It's about the joy of being on this planet, and it's about the joy of your chosen family,” says Stone. But per Sara Gruen’s original novel, Stone has to convey this narrative on a scale that can support the grandeur of trapeze artists, acrobats, and, as the title indicates, larger-than-life animals.

“It required me to tap into skills that I never had honed before,” Stone tells Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. For one, Water for Elephants was her first foray into the world of puppetry. “I started this whole process hating puppets,” she says. “I have now grown to love puppets.” The vocabulary of circus also acclimated her to a new kind of onstage movement. But rather than getting drunk on pure spectacle, Stone sees each stunning visual in terms of its dramatic function.

“It's an amazing kind of language to use for this kind of story, which is about this beautiful older guy who's taking stock of his life and remembering some of the most important chapters,” she says. Gregg Edelman plays the backward-gazing version of the story’s protagonist, Jacob Jankowski, while Grant Gustin portrays Jacob during his days with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. “To use circus, which is all about fragility and community, has been an incredibly eye-opening process for me.”

Fragility and community are all over Kimberly Akimbo as well, but where Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire’s quirky chamber musical set in the suburbs of New Jersey deals more in the internal, psychological realm, Water for Elephants sings to the rafters. “It's been just a totally different part of my brain,” says Stone. Though, if you look closely, you might notice that Water for Elephants echoes some of Kimberly’s biggest questions.

“The thing that appealed to me about the story,” Stone says, reflecting on her grand, audacious and sometimes “reckless” new Broadway musical, “was this idea of: Who are you when you lose everything?”