‘Jaws’ returns to Miami theater where it all began. ‘It’s like summoning ghosts’

Bruce is back.

The great white shark Steven Spielberg and his film crew named and that kept so many of us out of the water more than 50 years ago has returned to the Coral Gables theater where he made his South Florida debut on June 20, 1975.

This time Bruce promises to cooperate and deliver. This time the shark is hanging around for a month in familiar waters.

“Find something that connects with your community, in some way,” Actors’ Playhouse artistic director David Arisco says about the mission that has driven the South Florida theater he’s helped run since its founding nearly 40 years ago.

Sound like simple programming? In some places that may be difficult. But connections and community? We may be a transitional and a diverse community with myriad interests. But anyone who’s been in Miami long enough knows that we’re all connected in some way.

So in a sea of serendipity, Arisco’s South Florida professional premiere of Broadway’s “The Shark Is Broken” — a comic-drama play recounting how Spielberg’s problem-plagued “Jaws” movie was shot on the sea off Martha’s Vineyard between May and October 1974 — only makes sense if it’s staged at the Miracle. “The Shark Is Broken” runs from July 15 to Aug. 9.

The venue and the 1975 movie “Jaws” are forever linked.

Ian Shaw, the playwright, portrayed his famous father, “Jaws” star Robert Shaw, in “The Shark Is Broken” on Broadway.

The Miami-based actor playing Robert Shaw in the Actors’ Playhouse production of the play shares the same birth name as Ian Shaw and studied at the same prestigious London academy that Robert Shaw graduated from in 1948 — the same year the Miracle Theatre first opened in Coral Gables on Miracle Mile.

Then, if all of these connections aren’t kismet enough, The Miracle is presenting the original Spielberg movie, “Jaws,” on its big screen again for one-night-only on Sunday, July 12, as a $10 appetizer for the play and as a benefit for the 78-year-old theater’s ongoing preservation and stewardship as a historic Coral Gables building.

Original ‘Jaws’ theaters in Miami area

Apparently the whole world saw ‘Jaws’ there.

Rebecca Smith

“Jaws” originally played at the Miracle Theatre when film studio Universal opened the thriller based on Peter Benchley’s novel with its disclaimer and tagline, “You’ll Never Go in the Water Again,” on 409 screens nationwide on June 20, 1975. Miracle staff went all out. The theater decorated its lobby in the style of the seafaring movie with netting on the ceiling and nautical props along the walls. A set of “great white” choppers representing the “mindless eating machine” that “survived millions of years of evolution — without change” — beckoned to fans flocking through the theater’s swinging doors.

“Apparently the whole world saw ‘Jaws’ there,” Rebecca Smith, then head of Special Collections at what is now the Museum of Miami told the Miami Herald in 2013 when the Miracle hosted a series of “Jaws” retro screenings. Yes, she said she saw “Jaws” at the Miracle in the summer of 1975, too.

Universal quickly scrambled to make more prints of the unexpected smash that originated the film industry term, “summer blockbuster.” By July and August 1975, “Jaws” added theater screens in South Florida, including The 163rd Street Theatre and Loew’s 170th Street Theatre and Sunny Isles Theatre in North Miami-Dade, Kendall’s Dadeland Twin, and Coral Gables’ Riviera Cinema.

Only one venue survived the encounter.

Dadeland Twin was closed in 1988 and eventually its space held a short-lived XTra Supermarket and Computer USA store before becoming the current Downtown Dadeland mixed-use high rises and a standalone Publix 20 years ago.

The 163rd Street Theatre was demolished in 1996 and today a Home Depot stands on the land. The other North Dade theaters also closed years ago.

Riviera Cinema, the anchor of Riviera Plaza, closed in 1999. The strip mall near the University of Miami was demolished in 2021, and a two-story, block-long Publix opened on the rebuilt Riviera Plaza grounds in September 2025.

Only the Miracle Theatre, which has a blink-and-miss-it moment showing lines wrapping on and off Miracle Mile for “Jaws” in 1975 in the “Spielberg” documentary that streamed on HBO in 2017, remains intact and in use. You can see the Miracle, then a Wometco theater, at the 35-second mark in the “Spielberg” trailer on YouTube.

The Miracle Theatre originally opened as a 1,600-seat movie house on Dec. 7, 1948, with the Glenn Ford American comedy film, ‘The Return of October’ on its marquee. The Miracle closed as a full-time cinema on April 12, 1995. Several months later, in November 1995, the redesigned Miracle became the new home of Actors’ Playhouse.

‘The Shark Is Broken’ background

“The Shark Is Broken” takes its title and its storyline from the film crew’s frustrated messages to fledgling director Spielberg, then 27, via walkie-talkie, as his cast stewed, fussed, fought, and bonded aboard the listing Orca boat in Martha’s Vineyard waters. At the same time, the three main actors waited through mounting production delays that threatened to sink Spielberg’s folly. Everyone had to wait for the salt- and sea-battered mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, to work and cooperate so that they could get their shots completed.

Spielberg’s cast featured veteran British Shakespearean-trained actor and award-winning writer Robert Shaw, famed for his role as a villain in the 1963 James Bond adventure “From Russia With Love” and his Oscar-nominated performance as Henry VIII in the 1966 film, “A Man for All Seasons.” Rising star and perpetually suntanned Roy Scheider (”The French Connection”) and 27-year-old upstart Richard Dreyfuss (”American Graffiti”) co-starred. Their counterparts are the play’s three-member cast for “The Shark Is Broken.”

Actor Ian Shaw co-cowrote “The Shark Is Broken” with British comedy writer Joseph Nixon. Arisco directs Miami-based actor Iain Batchelor as Orca captain Robert Shaw, Wesley Slade as marine biologist Dreyfuss and Adam Poole as Amity police chief Scheider.

“Whether it be as simple as ‘Jaws’ playing at the Miracle Theatre, 50 years ago, or ‘Scott and Hem,’ when you’re doing a show about Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’re doing a show about people you know about, or you’ve read about, or you’ve heard of. So, I just think that we found that when we do a show that’s either directly about the community or about something that the community is aware of or involved in, in some way, it seems to make a difference,” Arisco, 70, said.

That feeling has been in the back of Arisco’s mind since he went to New York two years ago, looking for a title that could go on the list for a future Actor’s Playhouse production, he said. “When the rights become available, because of the whole relationship with the Miracle Theater and ‘Jaws,’ it felt like it was more important for us to do it than just because it’s good play.”

Even so, the connections almost seem scripted, too fantastical to be true.

Actors connection

Take the career path “Shark Is Broken” co-star Batchelor took to get through the Miracle’s stage doors that were once blocked by fans lining around the block to see a film about a cartilaginous fish with an appetite for hapless bathers and frazzled shark hunters 51 years ago.

Batchelor, 37, was born Iain Shaw in South Wales and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. As a student there, where he graduated with a bachelor’s in acting in 2010, he saw Robert Shaw’s name emblazoned on the boards on Gower Street alongside the names of other former Royal Academy students, Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman.

Batchelor says he first saw “Jaws” via a “bootlegged VHS” family copy of the film. His parents offered to show him “Jaws” when he was around 7 or 8. “I think I was one of those kids who definitely saw ‘Jaws’ a little younger than they should have, perhaps.”

But Shaw’s swashbuckling Quint character, and Harrison Ford’s rugged Han Solo in the 1983 “Star Wars” film, “Return of the Jedi,” inspired the young Iain Shaw to pursue acting 15 or 16 years before he studied at the Royal Academy, he said.

“My formative memories of the film, aside from the actual shark, without knowing any of the context of the shooting of that particular scene, is remembering Robert Shaw’s face in the Indianapolis speech moment. Even as a young child, knowing not necessarily anything about acting, but knowing that something special was happening just by looking into his eyes and seeing the kind of thought process behind what he was doing, and the danger and the unpredictability that he always transmitted when he was on screen, was my first kind of bookmarking of Robert Shaw in my mind as somebody who was special,” Batchelor said.

Around the time he was to graduate from the arts school his acting hero attended and 16 years later the character he’d play on stage in his adopted Miami since 2018, his teachers told the young Iain Shaw he had to register his name with the actor’s union to make sure his naming rights were available. If there were another actor with the same name registered, he’d have to select a different name.

This, for example, is why Michael (”Batman”) Keaton isn’t Michael Douglas on film marquees. His birth name Michael Douglas was registered by that earlier Michael Douglas you may have seen in 1984’s “Romancing the Stone” on the Miracle’s movie screen.

“So I’m thinking to myself, now there’s not going to be anyone with my name, because I spell my first name the Gaelic way with the two Is. Not a chance,” Batchelor said in a phone interview as he headed to the Miracle for rehearsals about a week before opening night.

“So I type my name in, and of course, there is one search match and I curse this Ian Shaw to the heavens, thinking to myself, ‘Now I’m going to go through the rigmarole of finding a completely new name.’ Batchelor is a name that was in the family, anyway, it’s my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, so it was an easy fit and it’s been my name ever since,” he said.

Still, Batchelor, who lives in Miami with his wife and daughter Lennox, who had an off-stage role as “the voice of the child” in the Actor’s Playhouse production of “The Girl on the Train” in May 2025 that he costarred in, has to chuckle. He’s stepping into the role originated by the actor who beat him to his name and to the stage playing Robert Shaw in “The Shark Is Broken.”

“When the opportunity arose, when Dave called me and was like, ‘Hey, would you like to be a part of this, and would you like to play Robert Shaw?’ I was like, “This is kind of like a circle of life completing itself. This is Ian coming into contact with me through the cosmos and saying, ‘Look, sorry for taking your name. I’ll give you some work.’”

Robert Shaw in Miami

The first Ian Shaw, born in London in December 1969 to Robert Shaw and his second wife, British actress Mary Ure, had visited the “Jaws” film set to see his dad at work with Scheider and Dreyfuss in Martha’s Vineyard in 1974 when he was 4. He didn’t see the finished “Jaws” and his father in his defining role for a couple more years. He was 6 or 7.

“I couldn’t even go in the bath, practically,” Shaw, 56, said in a Zoom interview from his home in Sussex.

Shaw had lingering memories of “Jaws” that lived up to the film poster’s famous tagline, “You’ll Never Go in the Water Again,” when Miami once again figures in the connection between all of these people and the theater.

Shaw, at 7, visited his father on another film set in 1977 about four miles southwest of the Miracle Theatre.

Robert Shaw was starring in yet another bestseller turned into an action film, “Black Sunday.” Shaw played an Israeli counter-terrorist who has to thwart a plan to crash a bomb-laden Goodyear Blimp into Miami’s Orange Bowl during an NFL Super Bowl.

Of course, when “Black Sunday” opened in theaters in the spring of 1977, it played at Wometco’s Miracle Theatre.

“I was in it as a little extra on the beach, but that’s the thing,” Shaw teases. “Miami Beach has got the beach where you think, ‘Well, that’s where the sharks are going to be.’ This amazing backdrop, you know. You can leave the theater and walk down to the beach and get eaten.”

Shaw laughs when he recalls another Miami moment and powerful Miami figure — almost as formidable as Bruce the mechanical shark and assuredly as tough as his dad: “Going on a plane,” Shaw said, “and Robert was talking with Don Shula.”

Shaw says he initially didn’t want to write, let alone star in, “The Shark Is Broken.” He was “nudged” into doing so by friends and family. Shaw starred in the play’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival run in 2019, its West End and Toronto stagings in 2021 and 2022, on Broadway in 2023, and its UK and Ireland tours in 2025.

He won’t be in Miami to watch Iain Batchelor step into the role he originated.

‘Summoning ghosts’

For his part, Batchelor says he doesn’t feel pressure so much as “just wanting to do a good job.” He’s aware of the lure “Jaws” has on Miami audiences, many of whom are still around and who saw the film from the Miracle main stage seats all those years ago.

“That just gives me those tingles of Hollywood and nostalgia that I’m sure anyone who went to watch the film at the Miracle back in the ‘70s felt as well,” Batchelor said. “I think for the audiences that come and see us, I think there’s going to be that kind of subliminal sense of deep connection with the play as well.”

Delivering the film’s pivotal Indianapolis speech on the stage’s recreation of the Orca, in the exact words and cadence Robert Shaw convinced Spielberg to let him write and deliver in 1974 when the original writer’s monologue proved “unperformable,” made the hairs on the back of Batchelor’s neck stand up during the early rehearsals in June, he said. “You feel like you’re summoning ghosts.”

“The Shark Is Broken” confronts Robert Shaw’s alcoholism. The actor had kept a “drinking diary,” his son said, which served as research for writing the play, along with conversations with Shaw’s widow, Virginia Jansen, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb’s “The Jaws Log” that was published in July 1975. Shaw’s second wife, Mary Ure, Ian’s mother, died at 42 in April 1975, when Ian was 4; Robert Shaw died at 51 in August 1978.

The play recounts the father-son dynamic between Shaw and his father, Thomas, who was also an alcoholic and who died when Robert Shaw was 12. “Shark” also recalls the on-set relationship between Shaw and Dreyfuss, which gives the story some comedic levity but also much of its frisson, its tension.

Dreyfuss, in 2023 after seeing the play’s depiction of his character, posed on the red carpet in New York with Ian Shaw and his Broadway costars afterward. But Dreyfuss complained to Vanity Fair that “Shark” and its depiction of his relationship with his “Jaws” co-star “hurt his feelings.” He told the magazine that his character was portrayed as a “big jerk” and “fool.”

Shaw counters. He told the Herald he feels Dreyfuss, now 78, is “in denial, I think a little bit, about what went on. He would prefer the story to be that everything was great, and that everybody got on swimmingly. But nobody else seems to say that’s what happened.”

A catharsis

Co-writing and starring in, and giving others the chance to interpret the role, has proven cathartic for Shaw.

“It’s pretty complex, because I loved him. Love him still. So I wanted to make sure that I didn’t show him any disrespect. But at the same time, there’s no point in doing something like this unless you try and do it as honestly as possible, and I know that’s how he always approached his work,” Shaw said.

“What I really admired about Robert was that he was unfiltered and honest. It’s interesting watching some of those chat shows that he was on. Nowadays, it just feels that everything is so managed, and everyone is selling themselves, and they’ve all got these PR people. It’s all very cozy. And everyone’s ‘wonderful.’ And ‘we all love each other.’ Whereas when you watch Robert on some of those earlier chat shows, it’s uncomfortable at times. But you really get the feeling that he’s authentic, and that he is an artist struggling to get to the root of things, struggling to get to the truth, and I admire that enormously. I wouldn’t have the courage to go on national television and speak my mind entirely,” Shaw said.

And now that the story of “Jaws” returns to its spiritual Miami home, Shaw is ready to let it go.

“I think there was initially a little bit of a thrill of the idea that I would be stepping into my dad’s shoes because of the obvious sort of almost like bringing somebody back from the dead thing,” he said, “But I’m really gratified to see that the play does well without me.”

If you go

What: “The Shark Is Broken” opens with previews July 15; opening night July 17; runs through Aug. 9. The “Jaws” film screens at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, July 12.

Where: Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre’s Dr. Lawrence and Barbara Stein Center for the Performing Arts, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables.

Cost and information: Ticket prices for “The Shark Is Broken” range from $40 to $80. “Jaws” screening is $10. Tickets can be purchased by calling 305-444-9293 or visit actorsplayhouse.org.