Flying auto steals the show on Broadway

NEW YORK — Actors often worry about appearing on stage with those perennial scene-stealers: children and dogs.

In "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," at Broadway's Hilton Theatre, even the show's kids and canines are upstaged by its title character, a flying red-and-gold motor car that gets the audience positively giddy with delight.

The automobile is quite something, a technological marvel that, yes indeed, does float high above the stage in this gargantuan musical, a huge show that actually fits quite snugly into the mammoth Hilton, one of Broadway's biggest houses.

In "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," a theme-park musical with an English accent, more is more, even when the story becomes less and less. It's cheery, relentless and constantly in motion.

With all that activity, "Chitty," a London success based on the 1968 movie that starred Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes, should keep the little ones occupied even if they can't quite follow the story. It tells of an eccentric British inventor and single father, Caractacus Potts, who salvages a junked heap of metal and turns it into a soaring roadster.

The car is coveted by the Baron and Baroness of Vulgaria, nasty folk who hate children and even have a creepy creature called the Childcatcher to round up any stray youngsters. Along the way, Caractacus, played by a game Raul Esparza, has a mild romance with Truly Scrumptious (a winsome Erin Dilly), a woman of sweet determination and a very pretty voice.

Jeremy Sams' meandering book plods along with a minimum of laughs until those Vulgarians, portrayed by a hammily robust Marc Kudisch and a delightfully comic Jan Maxwell, make an extended appearance in Act 2. Their excesses are funny. Unlike the Childcatcher, a Nosferatu-like fellow who is genuinely scary (Kevin Cahoon in fine spectral form), you actually like these villains.

The eclectic score by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman reinforces the show's persistent sunniness. The title song is one of those hypnotic ditties that will permanently imprint on your brain. Try to get it out of your head. Impossible.

The rest of the songs range from a lush lullaby to a music-hall turn to a campy samba to anthems that deliver homilies such as "teamwork can make a dream work." Gillian Lynne's choreography is often boisterous but more athletic than inspired.

Yet designer Anthony Ward, who did both the sets and the lavish costumes, has delivered a parade of inventive, visually stunning scenery. From a windmill home base for Caractacus, his two children and his father (the ever reliable Philip Bosco) to a gleaming candy factory to a sparkling fun fair to a grim dungeon that recalls "Les Miserables" at its gloomiest, the sets never stop.

Neither does the show. Except for the airborne antics of that flying car, which director Adrian Noble cagily restricts to the first and second-act finales, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" remains resolutely sugarcoated and earthbound.