Chaplin The Musical On Broadway

Chaplin The Musical is a good – but not great Broadway production.

However, I have been attending Broadway plays and musicals for 3 decades and I have rarely seen a better performance than that given by Rob McLure in the title role.

McClure takes Charlie Chaplin from his earliest days as a burlesque performer in seedy clubs in Britain to the heights of worldwide fame and then ages him through his years of exile in Europe in the space of 2 1/2 hours. At every step, McClure is letter perfect, alternately funny, touching, infuriating, idealistic, and manipulative. The real Charlie Chaplin was a complex man of genius and flaws, great artistry and enormous arrogance. Such is the brilliance of McClure’s performance that he manages to make Charlie Chaplin a three-dimensional character in a Broadway musical.

Several aspects of the staging of “Chaplin” are breathtaking. The very first sequence transitions from a film of McClure as Charlie Chaplin into McClure has the young burlesque comic walking a tight rope across the stage. The transition is flawless, like a superb movie dissolve. And the symbolism is an outstanding sample of combining historical reality with theatrical foreshadowing. Chaplin would walk a tight rope his entire life both professionally and personally. The script takes its time in showing us Chaplin before he became “The Little Tramp.” The sequence in which McClure first becomes “The Little Tramp” was staged so brilliantly and performed so fluidly that the audience gasped as it happened before their eyes.

The production features some bold choices in the use of color, costume, and makeup. The first act appears to almost be in black and white, as if we were watching an old movie. The second act, which transitions into the later Charlie Chaplin years, abandons the sepia staging, making the effect all the more fascinating.

I deeply respect the effort to create an original musical that encompasses over 50 years of a life spent in the public eye. It is an ambitious script, but not one that is uniformly successful. Several attempts to draw psychological parallels between Chaplin’s real-life and the amazing movies he created come off as heavy-handed psychobabble. The intersections of Charlie Chaplin’s life and art would have been apparent and more powerful if the audience was allowed to discover them as the story unfolded, rather than being bludgeoned with them. The music is not terribly memorable, yet certainly not un-enjoyable. However, several pieces of the choreography border between illogical and unnecessary, as if the production team felt that they simply had to put a dance number in, even where it made no particular sense.

Chaplin the musical is blessed with a stellar performance. Whatever the fate of the production –  at this moment its struggling to build an audience after receiving mixed, at best, reviews, I have no doubt that Rob McClure will be a Tony award nominee for his amazing star turn as Chaplin.