That classic icon from vaudeville and film, the great curmudgeon W.C. Fields said it best, “Never work with kids and animals.”

But he never worked with Richard Parker (the tiger). Fields would have met his match. A superstar without equal, on view in Life of Pi from Broadway at the Hobby, what a magnificent and oh-so-animalistic Bengal tiger, who shares a lifeboat with lone survivor Pi after a storm capsizes the freighter on which his family and remnants of the family zoo in Pondicherry, India, go down with the ship. His arduous adventure with his feline shipmate, who eyes him hungrily throughout, lasts 227 days, the last few two weeks without water.

We first meet this gorgeous jungle cat in the opening scenes at the zoo where he is fed Pi’s beloved goat. Pi hates him after that, and

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