With music and lyrics by the brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick and a book by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, “Mrs.
And speaking of shadows, there is the outsize one of the incomparable Robin Williams. In the film, Williams brought his endearing playfulness to the role of Daniel Hillard, a struggling actor who lacks discipline as a father.
The film pulled it off at the time, primarily thanks to Williams’s charms. McClure’s Daniel, though, is more irritating than entertaining, and his antics — which include hacking into his wife’s email account to sabotage her nanny search — are more creepy than kooky.
Frank and Andre — who get a paper-thin story line about adopting a child, by the way — are very loosely meant to serve as the gay conscience of a decidedly hetero production.
Lines from the movie about Mrs.
O’Farrell and the Kirkpatrick brothers, whose previous Broadway outing was the 2015 musical “Something Rotten!,” generate a smattering of laughs with the original material, like Frank’s quirk of shouting whenever he lies, and the second half of Daniel’s makeover song, when the list of fashion inspirations for a matronly Scottish nanny change from the glamorous Jackie O.
David Korins’s clean but generic set is composed of large movable pieces that convey each location: the Hillards’ lilac-walled San Francisco house, a courtroom, a 3-D graphic skyline with a lit up Golden Gate Bridge, a stencil overlay of a block of Victorian houses with the hairpin turns of Lombard Street in the background.
The production wants the audience to both like and be skeptical of its straight male protagonist, and it includes gay characters but doesn’t fully embrace them.