Broadway's The Shark Is Broken isn't the first New York connection to JAWS
You can catch The Shark Is Broken from 25th July 2023 at the Golden Theater, New York, NYC.
JAWS has long had a connection to New York, long before the Orca and its crew docked at the Golden Theater for its Broadway debut of The Shark Is Broken.
There would be no The Shark Is Broken if there had been no JAWS the film, and no JAWS the film if there had not been JAWS the book by Peter Benchley.
The author, who had a brief cameo as a news reporter, also shared a screenwriting credit with Carl Gottlieb on the Steven Spielberg film, was born in New York in 1940.
And Gottlieb – who would also go onto script duties for JAWS 2 and JAWS 3D as well as write the influential The Jaws Log, on which The Shark Is Broken takes several of its cues - is also a New Yorker, having been born there in 1938.
Roy Scheider – who is played by Daniel Connell on Broadway – played Chief of Police, Martin Brody. The character in the film had just moved from New York to the “quiet and calm” of Amity, but the actor himself was from New York. He resided in Sah Harbor, New York ahead of his death in 2008, aged 75.
And, arguably, Scheider’s most notable film roles were New York based, with him scoring the first of two Oscar nominations for his part as Buddy Russo in The French Connection (1971), and as Joe Gideon in All That Jazz (1979). It is somewhat fitting then that New York was also the setting for his professional acting debut, as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet.
Playing the wife of the Martin Brody in JAWS, JAWS 2 and JAWS the Revenge was Lorraine Gary, who although was raised in LA was also born in New York, in 1937. Spielberg spotted Gary in an episode of the New York-set Kojak, The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which led to her casting in the shark classic. Spookily, she played a character called Ruth Gardner (no relation to Ben) and that episode was directed by future JAWS the Revenge helmer, Joseph Sargent.
Richard Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn in 1947, he is played by Alex Brightman in The Shark Is Broken.
It was also in New York, in Roy Scheider’s apartment, that Dreyfuss told his fellow JAWS actor that he couldn’t play the Joe Gideon role in All That Jazz, a role that would ultimately pass to the Chief Brody star.
Robert Shaw is played by his son Ian Shaw, in what is his Broadway debut, but his dad was no stranger to treading the boards of Broadway, having appeared in numerous shows, with one of his own plays – The Man In The Glass Booth – also wowing New York audiences and critics alike. That’s befitting as Ian also co-wrote The Shark Is Broken, along with Joseph Nixon. Shaw would also star in the classic 70s heist thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which was directed by JAWS the Revenge’s Joseph Sargent.
The home of The Shark Is Broken is the Golden Theater, which may not be a stage that Robert Shaw performed on, but it is one that his wife – and Ian’s mum – Mary Ure, acted on. She appeared on the very same stage that her son now inhabits in Look Back In Anger in the late 1950s.
Ure is significant in JAWS history for another reason, as without her, Shaw may not have even taken the role of Quint, the shark-hunting captain of the Orca. It is reported that Shaw – a successful author himself - hated the book by Peter Benchley, but his wife, Mary Ure, urged him to take it.
The last time she urged Shaw to take a role so much was that of Red Grant in the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love (1963), so Shaw took it. Sadly, Ure would pass away in April 1975, just two months before the film was released across the US and changed movies forever.
Another JAWS cast member heralding from New York include Deputy Hendricks actor, Jeffrey Kramer, who has even been to see The Shark Is Broken on Broadway.
So, when Ellen Brody responds to Chief Brody in the hospital, “Home here, or home New York?”, Amity Island (Martha’s Vineyard) may be the home of JAWS, but New York is very much its spiritual home with so many of its key cast and creatives being born or having left their impression there, be it in writing, on stage or the big screen.
Words by Dean Newman
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