‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ now on Broadway, follows a safe formula
One sure sign that Broadway is bouncing back is the arrival of new shows based on hit movies. The latest is “Mrs. Doubtfire” — a sweetly clumsy valentine to broken families from the mid-1990s that arrives in the fraught 2020s.
What opened Sunday at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre is the musical equivalent of a softball down the middle: a safe, respectfully updated adaptation of a familiar plot with a great leading man, a few moments of lunacy and pro forma songs that disappear from memory like one of the many quick changes.
The supremely talented Rob McClure steps into the title role that the late Robin Williams made iconic on film, playing an actor who poses as his children’s portly Scottish nanny in order to spend time with them after losing custody in a divorce. “Yeah,” one of his kids announces, “this won’t put me in therapy.”
McClure has long deserved a role that shows what he can do and this is it: impressions — Darth Vader, Donald Trump and Yoda, among them — and a remarkable agility to dance in a fat suit, sing tenderly in a duet, breakdance, catch multiple airborne butter sticks in a pot, and showcase an almost Ed Sheeran ability create overlapping vocal loops while manipulating two puppets.
The writers — storywriters Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, with songs by Kirkpatrick and his brother, Wayne — are the same behind the original 2015 musical “Something Rotten!” but this time they’ve had to color within the lines of an established plot and are obligated to hit all the memorable bits from the movie — the “run-by fruiting,” the burned blouse, the cry of “Poppets!”
“Mrs. Doubtfire” is actually best when it goes on non-film flights of inspired nuttiness, like when a harried Doubtfire asks the computer assistant Siri for help cooking dinner and a full dance sequence breaks out, or when the stress of the subterfuge prompts a surreal number with 12 Doubtfires on stage at once.