All the benefits of film, and all the limitations of theater when it lazily follows in a film’s footsteps, are starkly evident in the numbing, dull, and astonishingly flat Mrs. Doubtfire, which opens Sunday night on Broadway. Most infuriating: It’s showing at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, which seems an especially egregious blasphemy.
The still-popular 1993 movie starred Robin Williams as Daniel Hillard, a man-child divorced from his wife who then drags up as an older Scottish female nanny to parent his own children and to earn money he needs to prove to the courts that he can be a responsible person. Mrs. Doubtfire eventually becomes a TV star, counseling America’s children—as her famous final speech goes—that there are all kinds of families, including divorced ones like Daniel’s, and to reassure the watching preteen masses that the world will go on.
Something terrible has happened in the translation from screen to stage. The benefits of close-ups are here absent. The benefits of editing are not here. So all the movie’s slapstick—can Daniel change into/out of drag in time to prevent discovery?; this is the entire plot—in real time just plays as a belabored endurance pantomime.
