Preview 2004-2005: The Car's the Star
That risqué tidbit is offered in the program to the family musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which had its premiere at the London Palladium on April 16, 2002 and is now in its third year in the West End. After it was a car and before it was a musical, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a short novel by Ian Fleming, who, between 1952 and 1964, wrote fourteen books about secret agent 007, James Bond. Written for his son, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was published in 1964, the year of Fleming's death.
The smash-hit series of films based on Fleming's Bond books began in 1962 with Dr. No. The films were produced by Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli and later by the Broccoli family. In 1968, after the release of the first five Bond films, Broccoli decided to adapt to the screen Fleming's Chitty Bang Bang Bang, with a screenplay co-authored by director Ken Hughes and popular children's author Roald Dahl whose Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the basis for another musical fantasy, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The Chitty film abandoned much of Fleming's story, replacing it with a new adventure. In the novel, the villains were a gang of top English crooks who, in order to get revenge on a family responsible for blowing up the gang's arsenal, kidnap the children, the plot eventually foiled with the help of the eponymous magic car. For the M.G.M./U.A. film, the writers invented the mythical kingdom of Vulgaria, whose Baron Bomburst covets the car, and where children are outlawed. To play the Baron, Broccoli hired Gert Frobe, who had scored in the title role of the Bond picture Goldfinger. Also eliminated from Fleming's story was the mother of the family, thus allowing the father a new love interest in the person of Truly Scrumptious.
The 1968 film was an overt attempt to repeat the formula of the smash hit Mary Poppins movie 1964. Both films were fantasies set in Edwardian England, and both had Dick Van Dyke as leading man, songs by the Sherman Brothers, and choreography by Marc Breaux and DeeDee Wood. In place of Poppins' leading lady Julie Andrews was Sally Ann Howes, who had replaced Andrews in Broadway's My Fair Lady.
Because it was not among the most critically acclaimed musical films of its time, one might not have expected to see a stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The fact that the show happened is due largely to its co-producer, Dana Broccoli, the recently deceased widow of Cubby Broccoli, and to another co-producer of the stage version, Cubby's daughter, Barbara.
The stage script was adapted from the screenplay by Jeremy Sams Amour, with direction by Adrian Noble, the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The elaborate set and costume designs are by Anthony Ward National Theatre Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady, and the choreography is by Gillian Lynne Cats, The Phantom of the Opera. Noble, Ward, and Lynne had previously collaborated on the London version of The Secret Garden.
In addition to Mary Poppins, the Sherman Brothers wrote the songs for such films as Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Happiest Millionaire, The Slipper and the Rose, and Tom Sawyer. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the first Sherman Brothers film score to reach the stage, beating Mary Poppins, which will join Chitty in the West End later this year and is surely bound for Broadway. The Sherman Brothers made it to Broadway once before, with the highly enjoyable '40s salute Over Here! 1974, starring the Andrews Sisters. They would have made it to Broadway again had their Tommy Tune vehicle Busker Alley not closed on the road in 1995.
The stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang retains all but one "Lovely, Lonely Man" of the film songs, with the Sherman Brothers collaborating on six new numbers, most notably "Teamwork," in which Caractacus Potts and his supporters express their determination to rescue the children, and "The Bombie Samba," a production number in honor of the Baron's birthday.
The star of the stage Chitty is, first and foremost, its flying car, which, like Audrey II in the recent Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors, levitates and extends out over the first rows of the auditorium. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is indeed a stage spectacle, and, in addition to that flying car, there's the moment when the villainous Childcatcher is hauled up in a net to disappear through the ceiling of the theatre. Chitty bears traces of English holiday "pantomimes," and is the sort of show that has the audience clapping along with the title tune as soon as the overture commences.
Mary Poppins should be a sure thing on Broadway. Chitty seems somewhat less certain, as some maintain that the film is more beloved in the U.K. than in this country. Still, Chitty, which opens April 28, 2005 at the Ford Center, is a big, comforting, old-fashioned crowd-pleaser, and will presumably attract a large family audience.
Reviews in London were mixed, but critics were mostly tolerant. New York Times critic Ben Brantley reviewed the production in 2002 and was unimpressed. Chitty has since been tweaked and revised, but then how much did revision help the Broadway versions of London's Taboo and Bombay Dreams? Whether or not Chitty is critic proof on Broadway remains to be seen, although one suspects that it very well may be.
The show seems right for the Ford Center, where it's rumored that Chitty will be even more lavish than it is at the Palladium. Already announced for the cast are Marc Kudisch and Jan Maxwell as the Baron and Baroness. Erin Dilly has been mentioned for Truly. And it appears there's a chance that Michael Ball will be brought over to repeat his Caractacus Potts. Ball, who was previously seen on Broadway in Aspects of Love, is hardly the box-office draw here that he is in England. But Ball proved to be just right for a part that has since been essayed in London by Gary Wilmot and Jason Donovan.
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