Final broadway performance of Ian Fleming`s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in December

03-Nov-2005 • Event

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang will play its final performance at the Hilton Theatre on December 31. At the time it closes, the musical will have played 34 previews and 285 regular performances - reports Broadway

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the musical adaptation of the 1968 movie of the same name, centers on an eccentric inventor, Caractacus Potts, who invents a flying car. Though Potts is happy just using the special car for family trips, others have more sinister aims. Adapted for the stage from Ian Fleming's original text by Jeremy Sams, the musical Chitty features a score by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, who wrote the film's songs. The show was directed by Adrian Noble and choreographed by Gillian Lynne.

After premiering in London (where it closed in September) in 2002, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opened on Broadway on April 25, 2005 to mixed reviews. In his Broadway.com Review of the tuner, Eric Grode wrote: ""Never mind the flying car. With a dozen kids, almost as many dogs, a flying outhouse and a harness effect that makes Jane Krakowski's entrance in Nine look like an Oshkosh Rep production of Peter Pan, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang offers as much bang as your buck(s) could want. It's overstuffed and undisciplined, it seems to make up the plot as it goes along, about a third of the songs in it are negligible, and you leave the theater thinking you might actually go back when your relatives come to town in the fall. Adapted with canny showmanship by Adrian Noble from the garish 1968 movie and Ian Fleming's original children's story, this latest London import is likely to earn the ire of anyone bemoaning Broadway's reliance on spectacle, and they'd have a good argument. But like 42nd Street, its predecessor in the Hilton Theatre, Chitty has enough laughs, flash, toe-tappers and scene-stealers to delight families more often than it will bore them."

The productions cast is led by Raul Esparza as Caractacus Potts, Erin Dilly as Truly Scrumptious, Philip Bosco as Grandpa Potts, Kenneth Kantor as Baron Bomburst, Jan Maxwell as Baroness Bomburst, Chip Zien as Goran, Robert Sella as Boris, Kevin Cahoon as the Childcatcher, Frank Raiter as the Toymaker and Henry Hodges as Jeremy and Ellen Marlow as Jemima.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.