Rob McClure's Nanny State: How the Mrs. Doubtfire Star Balances Broadway Fame and His Philly Family

Rob McClure was done. After 17 years as a working Broadway actor, he finally landed in a million-dollar hit. But just as the musical Beetlejuice was topping that magical weekly gross figure, he was forced to do something he never does—miss performances. And Amtrak was to blame.

“I will be missing the matinee of Beetlejuice today again, for the second time this month, because Amtrak can’t get it together,” a sweaty, agitated McClure announced from a stalled train in an August 31, 2019 Twitter video that received more than 157,000 views. “I’m unable to do what I do and what I love…” he continued. “I’m done, Amtrak. I’m DONE.”

The Amtrak battle had played out on social media for weeks throughout August. An increasingly frustrated McClure, who played dearly departed Adam Maitland in the musical, shared his Philadelphia commuter struggles—limited service, canceled and delayed trains as well as rapidly rising prices. With retweets, fellow actors and fans rallied behind the likable star, who also posted a three-page email he sent to Amtrak detailing his problems and revealing he spends $1,580 a month to ride the rails. (The transportation giant finally responded with an offer of a stipend that wouldn’t cover a round-trip ticket.)

“It was driving me bananas,” he says, chatting on a Tuesday morning while taking an (on-time!) Amtrak ride from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to New York City’s Penn Station. “I’d be somewhere in the marshes of Newark, New Jersey, and the train would just stop.” Amusingly, McClure would sometimes find himself stranded with Beetlejuice ticket holders who also couldn’t make it to the Winter Garden Theatre for the show. “I hate missing performances when I have pneumonia, but when I’m sitting in Newark?!” he says, shaking his head. “So, I was pissed. Someone was threatening to take away this life I created and I was like, ‘You can’t. You have to figure this out.’”

Just like the character he plays in the splashy new Broadway musical Mrs. Doubtfire, McClure would do anything to ensure a stable family life, and for him, that means living 100 miles from the lights of the theater district. He makes his home in historic Philadelphia with his wife of 10 years, actress Maggie Lakis, 15-month old daughter Sadie and cat Nico. They live in a formerly crumbling three-story row house in the Italian Market neighborhood that is now a warm and cozy retreat after a decade of renovations (the latest addition: two spacious roof decks with views of the downtown skyline). Also convenient: being halfway between grandparents: McClure’s parents are in New Jersey and Lakis’ mom is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

On the top floor of the home is what McClure calls “Theater Applebee’s.” The multi-purpose room is covered in memorabilia from the couple’s acting careers, and McClure's Broadway résumé—a framed drawing of Tony Walton’s I’m Not Rappaport set, Mrs. Thistletwat’s actual window from Avenue Q, an original Peter Max painting of McClure in Chaplin, a movie still of Honeymoon in Vegas, a Something Rotten! poster autographed by the cast, an illustration of the Noises Off cast by Broadway.com's Justin “Squigs” Robertson and many Beetlejuice dolls. As McClure describes it: “You know how at Applebee’s, it’s like the entire town has gone, ‘Here’s a box of shit we don’t need anymore,’ and they put it on the wall? That’s what my third floor is like!”

Missing from the room is Euphegenia Doubtfire, but that’s sure to change. At the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, McClure disappears eight times a week under prosthetic makeup and padding to become the lovable Scottish nanny in the musical adaptation of the 1993 Hollywood smash. Mrs. Doubtfire marks McClure's eighth Broadway show and, as the lead in a brand-new musical with a brand-name title, his biggest career break to date—all eyes will be on the theater star as he takes on one of Robin Williams’ most famous movie triumphs.

“It’s an honor to take a swing at it,” McClure offers. “I feel like my first responsibility is to let the audience know that I’m going to take care of the character they love. And if, in the first 10 minutes of that arrival, they can go, ‘OK, I trust you with Mrs. Doubtfire, then they’ll let me take the character somewhere new.” According to McClure, it’s also “hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” After all of last summer’s Amtrak drama, the star isn’t risking his job on a train line anymore and will split time between Philadelphia and Manhattan during the show’s run.

Kevin McCollum, the three-time Tony-winning producer of Rent, Avenue Q and In the Heights, scooped up the stage rights to Mrs. Doubtfire around the same time he was developing the original musical Something Rotten! Although an initial script was written by Doubtfire film star Harvey Fierstein (book), Alan Menken (music) and David Zippel (lyrics), he enlisted the writing team from Something Rotten!—Karey Kirkpatrick (book/lyrics), Wayne Kirkpatrick (music/lyrics) and John O’Farrell (book)—to take a fresh stab at the project in 2018.

By this time, McClure had earned raves for replacing Brian d’Arcy James in the leading role of Nick Bottom for the final seven months of the Broadway run of Something Rotten! and then headlining the show’s national tour for another 16 months, opposite Lakis as onstage wife Bea. (Not to mention documenting the journey with one of Broadway.com's most popular backstage vlogs with Bottoms Up!). McCollum’s history with the actor goes back even further—McClure spent three years in various roles with Avenue Q, closing out the Broadway run as Princeton/Rod.

Team Doubtfire knew they found their star, and McClure was brought in to help develop the role. “Kevin McCollum and the writers had a real sense of who I was and what I do by then,” he says. Because the character of Daniel Hillard is an actor who dubs voices, they wanted to tap into McClure’s talents: “They would write 15 voice impressions for one section and I would get there and be like, ‘I can do eight of those 15.’ They’d say, ‘OK, well who do you do?’ And I would go home and think about who I’m good at impersonating, email them the names, and they would write around the voices I could do.” Now, thanks to a talent he's been working on since childhood, audiences will hear McClure impersonate everything from Sesame Street to The Lord of the Rings. His Avenue Q puppeteering skills are also engaged.

Nothing is more flattering to an actor than getting to shape a showcase role around your unique talents. It was really McClure’s Tony-nominated turn as silent film great Charlie Chaplin in the short-lived Chaplin that showed off his full range of talents—physical comedy, showbiz panache, dramatic chops. “I feel like the reputation I got on Chaplin was, ‘Hmm, we need someone who can stand on a ball and juggle chainsaws… Well, McClure can figure it out!’”

Although Mrs. Doubtfire allows McClure to show off many of those skills (minus the chainsaws), he says what audiences really connect to is the title character’s warmth: “We all hear that voice in our head and there’s a warm and fuzzy thing that happens.” And since he’s really playing two roles in the show, Mrs. Doubtfire and Daniel Hillard, McClure feels he has even great freedom with Hillard. “It almost feels like when I played Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “Playing [Chaplin’s famous film character] The Tramp was one thing, but when I was doing Chaplin, the guy nobody knew, I could bring a lot of me to that. With Daniel Hillard, I’m going to walk out and immediately not be Robin Williams, which is freeing.”

Of course, Hillard disguises himself as Mrs. Doubtfire as a ruse to see his children, who are caught in the middle of his difficult divorce to wife Miranda (Jenn Gambatese in the musical). “I remember when the movie came out,” McClure says. “All of my friends who were from divorced households said it was the first movie that wasn’t The Parent Trap—saying that the happy ending is the parents getting back together. Instead, it was saying, maybe you’re better for the divorce, you’re going to be OK and you can redefine what family means. That was huge then.” The musical has expanded the message of unconventional families even more for 2020—Daniel’s gay brother Frank (Brad Oscar onstage) and his partner Andre (J. Harrison Ghee) have a fleshed-out storyline involving their desire to adopt a child.

“It’s a family drama wrapped in a comedy,” McClure says. “And I think that’s why it sings. Everyone’s going to leave with their abs hurting but also really moved. It’s exciting.”

Another secret weapon of Mrs. Doubtfire may be Jerry Zaks, the four-time Tony-winning director with 30 years of hits under his belt who happens also to be a personal hero of McClure's: “I used to get those ‘two-fer’ discount tickets in high school and was able to see his revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum three times—with Nathan Lane as Pseudolus, then with Whoopi Goldberg, then with David Alan Grier! Now I’ll have moments in rehearsal where I’ll be like, ‘Oh my God. We have the same sense of humor!’ And then I realize it’s because he shaped my sense of humor. My sense of humor belongs to him. I’m obsessed with everything he ever directed.”

Zaks told Broadway.com that McClure has “the soul of a seasoned comic performer.” Flattered by his star’s love of his past work he thinks just as many future performers will be influenced by McClure’s turn in Mrs. Doubtfire. “Rob has the required bravery that all good comic actors need—the lack of fear of being silly and the ability to make the stakes life or death. There’s music in comedy that is undeniable and he hears it.” Zaks knew from the first reading in front of an audience that McClure was the right actor: “It was clear that the audience falls in love with him.”

McClure first tried to earn an audience's love at the age of eight when he took to the stage of David E. Owens Middle School in New Milford, New Jersey in 1990. The fourth-grader did a rapid act, clocking in just over a minute, and featuring five impressions: Roger Rabbit, a robot, Igor from Young Frankenstein, Beetlejuice (!) and the Jackalope from America’s Funniest People. He didn’t leave room for the audience to laugh between bits, but they did anyway, especially for Igor, the most physical of his impressions. “I was like 4’2” and 70 pounds,” McClure says. “Just a little nothing. And it was the first time that people were like, ‘That was funny!’”

New Milford High School is where McClure really found his calling, landing leading roles like J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly! and Charley in Where's Charley?, the latter of which earned him a Rising Star Award from Paper Mill Playhouse. He also found a theater family: “Your friends go from seeing each other in class and being awkward to sitting in the basement listening to Les Miz at 2AM and crying. Those connections I made back then are still some of my best friends in the world.”

The Paper Mill win got him a scholarship to the theater’s summer conservatory and led to the role of Enoch Snow Jr. in the New Jersey theater company's 2001 production of Carousel. He also sat high in the flies above the stage to drop the cherry blossoms onto Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow during their romantic “If I Loved You” moment. “They’re like, ‘They’re just coming down by themselves.’ No, they’re not. There’s an 18-year-old non-Equity kid in the flies!” The following year, the theater hosted a pre-Broadway revival of I’m Not Rappaport and McClure was cast as an understudy, leading to his first Broadway credit. Shortly after, he did Oliver! in Nyack, New York opposite a 10-year-old Joe Jonas as the Artful Dodger.

And then? Nothing. “I had a Broadway credit,” he remembers. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. Once you’ve been on Broadway, you work! And that was such a lie.” But rather than getting bitter about his career not kicking in, McClure got busy at his former school, directing student productions at New Milford High. Young Joshua Dela Cruz (now the host of TV’s Blue’s Clues) played McClure in one, an original musical the Doubtfire actor wrote called Bagel Boy about a 4AM bagel shop job that he actually held during high school.

“Directing those four years at my old high school made me such a better actor,” he now says. “In trying to get performances out of these kids, I felt like I was becoming better. And if you direct at a high school with a small budget, you’re the director, lighting designer, set designer, costume designer…Next thing you know, you’re hanging from the ceiling upside down trying to program a moving light that you rented, or trying to fundraise to afford the moving light!”

The break from Broadway also introduced McClure to Philadelphia native Lakis, who played Frenchy opposite his Doody in a 2005 production of Grease at the Lenape Performing Arts Center in Marlton, New Jersey, and she in turn introduced McClure to her hometown. “Maggie showed me the Philly theater scene,” he remembers. “I started auditioning there and got three shows lined up. So, I thought, ‘I’m going to go down there, move in with my girlfriend, do those three shows and see where it takes me!’ I just loved the vibe of the city, and I loved Maggie—she so loved the city that I couldn’t help but see it through her eyes.”

Fourteen years after moving there full-time, the love for Philly remains strong for McClure, as he and his wife have turned their attentions on their daughter. Sadie was born on December 9, 2018, three weeks after he finished the out-of-town run of Beetlejuice in Washington, D.C. and three months before the musical started its Broadway engagement in the spring of 2019. “She was born in that little window,” he marvels. “I had paternity leave—it was such a miracle that we were both home and got to enjoy those months with her.”

“She’s a little joy machine,” McClure says of Sadie, who got her name because mom and dad liked that it sounded sweet and “old-timey.” “She’s such a reflection of me and her mom. My wife is an amazing mother. I couldn’t have predicted it—I hoped, but then you see it and you’re like, ‘Whoa.’ There’s this whole, beautiful other side of Maggie that I’m getting to see. And nothing will refocus your priorities like a kid. All of the sudden, you have a great reason to say no.”

McClure can’t deny the fact that playing a parent who would do anything for their kids in Mrs. Doubtfire is more special now that he actually is a parent who would do anything for his kid. “I’m not a goofy method actor who thinks if you’re playing a heroin addict, you have to do heroin,” he says. “That’s stupid. But there is a deepening that happens when you’re playing a parent and you have a kid at home.”

As he kicks off the latest all-consuming Broadway dream job, McClure can’t help but see into his future. He’s eager to embarrass a teenage Sadie with tales of his theatrical adventures (“If my dad says Thistletwat in front of my friends one more time…Dad! Please don’t talk about the puppet sex show! GOD!”) and continue filling the walls of his Theater Applebee’s with more show swag.

“I can’t wait,” he says, a smile growing across his face. “I want to be that character actor who comes in and knocks some batty old character out of the park. I look forward to it. May I be so lucky.”

Shot at Federal Donuts and Design Hive | Produced by Lindsey Sullivan | Photos by Emilio Madrid | Video Edited by Kyle Gaskell | Additional Cameras: Alexander Goyco, Mark Hayes and Nick Shakra | Styling by Jake Sokoloff | Hair and Makeup by Abby Berni and Bethany Serpico