• Mrs. Doubtfire (musical)

9/12/24 (Thurs), West End

I was wary of yet another musical retread from a beloved old film. In the movie, Robin Williams had a field day with the story of a divorced man who, granted only limited visitation rights with his children, disguises himself as a female nanny in a bid to stay close with them. It’s essentially the Robin Williams Show, so dominated by its central performance that it was hard to imagine how another actor could put his stamp on it. In any case, the musical was the unexpected choice of a friend, so I went along politely, albeit with expectations in check.

The musical, following the film fairly closely, shows the dad as fun-loving to an extreme degree but little else, suggesting that neither the wife or judge was wrong in holding the kids back from him. Still, if we accept that as his personality, the show more or less works – this is farce, after all. The book laudably draws its humor from the characters and situation rather than tired jokes, though it did throw in lots of contemporary references (some of which I didn’t quite get) that will soon be out of date. It was all rather frantic due to the dad’s personality, which was inevitably drawn from William’s hyperactive film performance, but it did have a logic to it that worked. The story was nicely reworked to fit the needs of the stage to allow for the constant costume changes from man to maid and back. The only real irritant was the overuse of children, which was cloying as presented here. I don’t need to pay these prices to see preteens acting cute. Their song together would be the first thing I’d jettison as director.

The music sounded PC-generated rather than composed, and the lyrics were narrative rather than descriptive, as per the par for shows these days. Most of the songs simply slowed the action down rather than enhancing the story; the show would have been much more fun without most of them. The exceptions were the numbers for the man’s transformation to Doubtfire (where various personalities like Jackie O danced around as examples of what he might become) and the restaurant show, which were there mainly to give the actor time for rapid costume changes. Another highlight was the hilarious parade of Doubtfires as he is going bonkers. Unburdened by the need to tell the story, they were just fun tunes. I would have liked more of that.

Gabriel Vick was a bundle of energy as the father. While he was obviously channeling Williams, no complaints when done as well as this. The others were fine but stood no chance against this performance.

The clever staging justifies the move from film to theater in a way that other movie-based shows, such as Groundhog Day, weren’t always able to manage. While I got tired of its redundant musical sequences, which tell us what we can already see perfectly well, it’s welcome in its general good cheer and avoidance (for the most part) of excess sentimentality. Enjoyable.