Mrs Doubtfire, Shaftesbury Theatre review - bold musical makeover of the hit comic film

The heart sinks (mine does, anyway) as the latest film-to-musical adaptation rolls into town, all with similar sound-worlds, exemplary hoofing and lively stagings. They are handy audience-bait, oven-ready stories. People go to see how the creative team are going to render the film’s main achievements, though not to be that surprised: the show must go on as it did before, with all the familiar tropes.

So when the Mrs Doubtfire musical was announced, I bet I wasn’t the only one who wondered a) how all the costume and face changes would be handled live onstage; and b) would the ample Doubtfire bosom actually catch fire, as Robin Williams’s had done in the 1993 film? It’s no Mission Impossible, but the actor playing Daniel Hillard/Mrs Doubtfire would still need to change totally, and quickly, and back again.

Credit, then, is due to the bold team, led by director Jerry Zaks, that set Gabriel Vick the task of changing from a fortysomething San Franciscan actor in casual clothes into a Scottish nanny of a certain age, right in front of our noses. And double credit to Vick for pulling it off, not just once but several times, including a scene where he pingpongs between a restaurant’s rest rooms and its dining area, flipping between Daniel and Doubtfire in a matter of seconds. 

The key to these lightning changes is a latex mask, through which his real eyes peer. (In the heat last week, it’s a miracle he survived.) On over the top slips the grey-haired wig, in go the dentures and what look like false cherry-red lips, and there she is: Euphegenia Doubtfire, nanny to his own children, his means to spending time with them when a judge has ruled otherwise. Vick also wears a fat suit underneath his tartan skirt and cardie, which the writers put to an even greater test in a scene where Daniel agrees to be the plus-size model for his ex-wife’s new sportswear range, sporting briefs and a crop top. It’s a total crowdpleaser.

The problem the show has, though, is that Daniel is inherently annoying for most of the first half, the opening moments in particular, where he races through some deliberately overegged vocal impressions, as if pitching his performance at very small children. When his unhappy wife Miranda (Laura Tebbutt) comes on to sing a song with the lyric, “He has three children, I have four”, you wholly sympathise and wonder how to get through the next two hours. 

The show sustains this exhausting high-energy approach throughout, eventually making it pay off in the second half with a fantasy sequence in which a confused Daniel races around an empty stage in a welter of characters, seeing multiple Doubtfires laughing at him, who then line up for some Riverdance jigging. But for too many stretches of the first half his shtick is loud and exhausting. All around him have much the same affliction, even his three children, and especially the gay costume designers (Andre Mayem, Cameron Blakely) who help him transform into Doubtfire: Blakely is actually given the running gag of shouting when he’s lying. It’s a decent gag with a funny payoff, but as with the rest of the cast, he’s miked up as if for the hard of hearing.

The music is standard for a 21st century musical, with an intrusive lead guitar that reminded me of the Muppets band. But hats off to the ensemble, who give it their all in amusing choreography by Lorin Latarro across multiple roles. Especially funny is the collection of butch role models for Doubtfire’s “look”: the male dancers dressed as Julia Child, Mrs Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Eleanor Roosevelt, with a touch of Oscar Wilde. 

That detail alone tells you grown-up thinking has informed the writing. The lyrics are often pointed and witty, rhyming “too British”, say, with “too Brad Pittish” when Daniel (as Doubtfire) is trying to sabotage the budding relationship between handsome rival Stu (Samuel Edwards, pictured above with Vick) and his ex-wife. The plot allows easy ironies, where lines like “Mrs Doubtfire is something else” and she’s “too good to be true” take on added meaning for the audience to smile at. But the script has also been retooled, like a good panto, to play to the local crowd, with injections of topical jokes — inevitably, Boris makes an appearance (the third stage Boris I have seen in the past seven days: enough). There are now mobile phones and tablets in the mix, but the dance with the old-style vacuum cleaner remains, and it’s a blast.

As in the film, the show has a sweet core, played at times with maximum saccharin, though a lot of people in the audience were audibly moved. The real draw is Vick, a super-talented, five-star performer. The scene in which he noodles around at the empty TV studio where he is a janitor, sampling his voice and adding beatbox flourishes for a duologue between mouse and rat puppets, is superb. If the rest of the show could turn it down from 11 a bit more, this would be the ideal family excursion for accompanying adults too.

• Mrs Doubtfire is at the Shaftesbury Theatre 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk