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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's an Aereo-automobile!
By Harry Haun
03 May 2005
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Sherman; Raul Esparza; Erin Dilly; Ellen Marlow & Henry Hodges; Philip Bosco; Anne Jeffreys; Rachel Dratch & Tina Fey; Kathie Lee Gifford; Jesse Tyler Ferguson & Chip Zien; William Finn; Kevin Cahoon; Robert Sella; Jan Maxwell & Marc Kudisch
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Calling all kids (including the kid inside): That winged roadster of old—Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (chronologically 1910, cinematically 1968)—touched down April 28 at the Hilton Theatre as the ultimate Broadway kiddie's show. Adults can safely come, too.
Plenty did. You could spot them later at the party at the Hilton Hotel, partaking of the photo-op, posing (sans children) beside the famous flying car as proudly as if they had just purchased the farm. In the 37 years since the four-wheeled wonder was first roadtested on screen, a whole generation has grown up with memories of that merry original filmusical by The Brothers Sherman (Richard M. and Robert B.) and, of all improbable bedfellows, OO7's late Ian Fleming. We're talking childhood memories here, and that generation now has a generation of their own to pass those memories along to.
"Face it: the car's the star," The Post critic Clive Barnes conceded the morning after. To see it lift off terra firma (timidly and tentatively at first but building to what could actually be called airborne) is worth a ticket to ride for both generations. And the star cargo on board has been hand picked to make this 124-minute trip as pleasant as humanly possible.
In the front seat, at the controls: Raul Esparza as post-Victorian inventor Caractacus Potts, obviously a Rube Goldberg disciple from the looks of the sets; beside him in the catbird seat is Erin Dilly, Truly Scrumptious in spirit and actual name. Filling the rumble seat are his motherless, subteen brood of two (Henry Hodges and Ellen Marlow) and Philip Bosco as his fuddy-duddy dad, a British Army retiree who anachronistically knows Groucho Marx jokes (only one really, but it has torturously endless variations).
The overture wastes no time breaking into the other reason why everybody is there—the jaunty, Oscar-nominated title tune which the Shermans based on the god-awful, start-stop sounds that the vehicle makes in working up a full head of steam. A clap-along, almost inevitably, breaks out, following the sprightly beat of conductor Kristen Blodgette. Her hair bops in time to the music engagingly—audience-engagingly—and, when the title contraption eventually took flight, it seemed to come perilously close to parting her hair.
The song made such infectious exit music that normally sound-minded first nighters filed out like pod people onto open-air double-decker tour buses that were waiting to take all from Hilton to Hilton. "Open-air" would have been a splendid idea on a warm night.
Wisely avoiding the windy wilds of the second story were a clever Connecticut contingent that included two of Britainia's best gifts to Broadway (Millicent Martin and Sally Ann Howes) and Elaine Orbach, Jerry's widow. Martin, who looks like Debbie Reynolds these days but still speaks in crisp King's English, did the original 42nd Street with Jerry, finished a four-year stint with "Frasier" and an independent British flick with Joan Plowright. Her last appearance on stage was the Houston world-premiere of Hal Hackady's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Howes, of course, is the original Truly Scrumptious. A proper fuss was made over her by the photographers and the press when she arrived at the theatre. "I felt like I was Nicole Kidman," she laughed later. "They flew me over to London when the play premiered there, and Michael Ball [who played the Dick Van Dyke lead] brought me up on stage after everyone had taken their curtain call. It was thrilling! I said, `This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life—show up at the premieres of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.'"
She adored both versions, thought it was bigger in Britain because of the size of the theatre over there (the Hilton here is hardly a shoebox), appreciated the script-trimming done for the states and made her peace with Truly's loss of songs in the stage versions. "They cut one and gave a few to Michael since he's so well-known there as a singer."
If there was anyone more truly scrumptious at the theatre, it was Anne Jeffreys, who came in out of nowhere, or L.A., to attend the opening and then jetted right back out. Still visually a stunner—at 82 going on 60—she is beloved in a variety of mediums: stage (Kiss Me Kate), screen (she was Dick Tracy's Tess Trueheart) and TV ("Topper"). "My friends and I just got in this morning, and we're leaving right after the show. They have their own plane so we just drive when they feel like going. That's the kind of friends to have, right? Particularly for people like me who love the theatre so."
Her husband, Robert Sterling, has been bedridden for four years, she said, "but he's very liberal with me. I told him about this trip, and he said, 'Go, honey. Have a good time.'"
Another unexpected first-nighter off the beaten track was Chicago Tony-nominee Marcia Lewis, who has semi-retired to Nashville to be the wife of banker Fred Bryan. "We got in this morning," she said. "Went to Sardi's for lunch. I wondered if my caricature would still be up. It was. My friend, Lee Roy Reams, told me, 'You gotta go in and let them know you're around 'cause, if you don't, they'll put it on the second floor.' They didn't."
Possibly planning some long-term family entertainment, a pregnant Tina Fey was present to check out Chitty, as were her "Saturday Night Live" cohorts, Rachel Dratch and Fred Armisen. Also: Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford and their Cassidy (no Cody).
Chris Biggins, who gives at the office in London (as the nefarious Baron), spent his few days off from Chitty, catching this one. Trish Walsh-Smith, wife of Shubert prexy Phil Smith, made sure he met and chatted up Esparza, who had seen the London production.
Late-arriving—because they had their own shows to do—were Jonathan Dokuchitz, now the TV deejay of Hairspray, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who's opening Monday at Circle in the Square in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. William Finn, who contributed songs to the latter, attended the show as a longtime friend of Chip Zien, one of two nefarious characters pumping conflict and turmoil in the evening's proceedings.
Dokuchitz was there for Dilly, and Ferguson was there for Kevin Cahoon, a pal (before and) since the "Encores!" Hair—and Chitty's chief heavy, The Childcatcher, who corrals and jails all the subteens in the vicinity of Vulgaria. It is complete boos, he said, "from the minute I show up to the curtain call," and it doesn't help any—then, again, it helps an awful lot—that he is made up to look like the archetype of scary silent-screen evil: Max Schreck in the vampiric title role of F. W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu. "But there's a lot of glamour to him," Cahoon insisted, trying to put a good face on it. "The character is very egocentric and has a lot of vanity. We do big red lips and crazy eyebrows for him."
Not a lot of love is lost between him and the audience when he is hoisted by a cargo net to the moon, it would seem. (Quite a few of the actors become airborne at one point or another during the show, including Bosco who does his traveling in a portable outhouse.)
"I had a fear of heights before I started, but I don't now," Cahoon confesses. "I can see the audience, and they love that part so much that I get off on it as well. I guess that you just have to commit to the moment and not think about the danger you're going through."
Zien and Robert Sella likewise contribute some broad-stroked villainy to the proceedings as a pair of spies who could be Laurel and Hardy doing English panto. The roles, said Sella, have been sorta Americanized a bit. "They gave us a real opportunity to find things that were funny for us. It was a struggle sometimes to say, 'In America this would be better,' because the difference between our characters is the difference between music hall performance and vaudeville. We're walking a line between 'Yes, we're characters in the play, but, yes, we're also watching out for you to have a good time.' There are more laughs when the audience's adult. Kids have a different vibe about the spies we play. Sometimes the old humor goes over their heads. We love it when the adults come." Continued...
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