Did Broadway Critics Have a Wild Ride at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

With a cast that includes Raúl Esparza, Erin Dilly, Philip Bosco, Kevin Cahoon, Jan Maxwell, Marc Kudisch, Chip Zien and Robert Sella, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is filled with big legit talent. It also has a flying car! But did New York critics think the tuner, a London hit that opened at the Broadway's Hilton Theatre on April 28, was the most fantasmagorical stage musical in the history of everything?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Eric Grode in his Broadway.com Review: "Never mind the flying car. With a dozen kids, almost as many dogs, a flying outhouse and a harness effect that makes Jane Krakowski's entrance in Nine look like an Oshkosh Rep production of Peter Pan, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang offers as much bang as your bucks could want. It's overstuffed and undisciplined, it seems to make up the plot as it goes along, about a third of the songs in it are negligible, and you leave the theater thinking you might actually go back when your relatives come to town in the fall. Adapted with canny showmanship by Adrian Noble from the garish 1968 movie and Ian Fleming's original children's story, this latest London import is likely to earn the ire of anyone bemoaning Broadway's reliance on spectacle, and they'd have a good argument. But like 42nd Street, its predecessor in the Hilton Theatre, Chitty has enough laughs, flash, toe-tappers and scene-stealers to delight families more often than it will bore them."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "The performers, especially Mr. Esparza, sometimes try to create the impression of real and spontaneous feelings, a noble but doomed attempt. There is some mechanically efficient dancing choreographed by Gillian Lynne, of Cats fame, though the audience probably prefers the battalion of real live dogs that dash across the stage in the first act. And, yes, the car really flies, though not with the greatest of ease, and you fear for the safety of its occupants. Cranky grown-ups will be most diverted by the performances of Marc Kudisch and especially Ms. Maxwell, who play the child-loathing Baron and Baroness of the empire of Vulgaria and who have been given some appealingly ripe dialogue... The real star, of course, aside from the car, is Mr. Ward, who has created sets and costumes that look as expensive as they no doubt are, a rarity among Broadway musicals at the moment."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "All the Rube Goldberg-like mechanisms scattered through the show delight, with their delicious ratchets, gears, pulleys, sprockets and spindles, plus other assorted flying objects. But nothing comes close to that triumph of theatrical hydraulics, the flying car itself, which goes up, down, left and right, and for a few dizzy moments actually hovers over the first rows of the orchestra. Ian Fleming, upon whose children's book the story is based, would surely have loved it, while James Bond would probably have traded in his Aston Martin for one. The musical itself is the kind of show adults assume children will love, and most of the time, they'll have assumed correctly... It's essentially a children's show, but the adults they bring along with them, shouldn't have too bad a time — especially when Zien, Sella, Kudisch and Maxwell are front and center."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "The humans onstage exert superhuman energy to enliven this not-very-compelling story, but the show mainly comes to life when the gigantic car appears... Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a cynical affair, a jerry-built plot and a flimsy score... For the most part, the evening is listless, the plot merely providing pretexts for the unexciting songs and Anthony Ward's lavish, imaginative sets and costumes. Since Ward's effects are the main attraction, why does it have to last 2-1/2 hours? If the show were shorter, you could run it all day long."

David Rooney of Variety: "The good news is that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a lot more diverting than the nearly unwatchable MGM movie and far tighter in its Broadway incarnation than in the belabored London staging that spawned it. While the car floats and flies, the unapologetically quaint musical soars mainly in its technical displays. But it offers cheery clap-along distraction for the under-12s and more than a modicum of charm for those forced to accompany them."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a theme-park musical with an English accent, more is more, even when the story becomes less and less. It's cheery, relentless and constantly in motion... Jeremy Sams' meandering book plods along with a minimum of laughs until those Vulgarians, portrayed by a hammily robust Marc Kudisch and a delightfully comic Jan Maxwell, make an extended appearance in Act 2. Their excesses are funny. Unlike the Childcatcher, a Nosferatu-like fellow who is genuinely scary Kevin Cahoon in fine spectral form, you actually like these villains. The eclectic score by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman reinforces the show's persistent sunniness... Except for the airborne antics of that flying car, which director Adrian Noble cagily restricts to the first and second-act finales, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang remains resolutely sugarcoated and earthbound."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "You know how big family shows are hyped as being fun for children of all ages? Well, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang really sort of isn't. Unlike, say, The Lion King, which captivates on a deep variety of levels, Chitty... might be best appreciated by tots, tweens and grown-ups who were besotted by the merry 1968 movie when they were tots and tweens. For some of the rest of us, director Adrian Noble's extravaganza is slow to start and, until a burst of goofy wit in the second act, as hard to follow as it is to hear in this people-dwarfing theater with its fuzzy amplification."