Chaplin

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

**

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It’s one thing to have a silent star; it’s quite another to have him disappear altogether, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Yet all too often in this plodding musical, Charlie Chaplin goes missing in action, “devoured by a swarm of man-eating clichés.” Chaplin was, of course, one of film’s “most significant and influential artists,” not least because he could be a magnificent storyteller without saying a word. In a Chaplin film, “scenes that might read mawkish in other hands feel fresh, piquant, and hilariously sad.” Alas, this isn’t a skill the creators of this misbegotten “rags to riches to loneliness saga” have mastered.

The show has precious little to recommend it, said Jeremy Gerard in Bloomberg.com. “It isn’t engaging musically, and worse, it isn’t funny.” Yes, Chaplin’s early life was Dickensian—his childhood in London’s East End featured a mentally ill mother and abandonment by his father. But Thomas Meehan and Christopher Curtis’s book is distressingly heavy-handed in the way it enlists those details in service of crude pop psychology. You never see what made Chaplin great, particularly “the crucial role that silence plays in silent movies.” Instead, we get Curtis’s sorry attempt at a pastiche-style score and a hackneyed plot that focuses on Chaplin’s string of May-December romances.

It’s odd that a show of such “insulting simplicity” should provide our introduction to a bright new Broadway star, said Scott Brown in New York magazine. Rob McClure is “a relative unknown who won’t be for much longer,” thanks to his electrified performance here. Taking on the “terrifying risk” of playing a film icon, he “proves himself a brilliantly gifted physical comedian, an able clown, and a passionate musical theater performer all rolled into one.” Always in motion, he “tells a more interesting story with his body” than the script ever manages. “As a musical,” Chaplin isn’t much. “As the canny redeployment of an icon, it sometimes flirts with excellence.”