Not Exactly Golden Tickets: “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Anastasia” on Broadway

Christian Borle plays Willy Wonka as a showman with a sadistic streak in Broadways “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
Christian Borle plays Willy Wonka as a showman with a sadistic streak in Broadway’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”PHOTOGRAPH BY JOAN MARCUS

What’s sweeter than a rags-to-riches story? Cinderella, Little Orphan Annie, Eliza Doolittle—all made the journey from poverty to the palace, and all have been the subjects of Broadway musicals. To those, add two more tales of extreme class mobility, which have just opened on Broadway: “Anastasia” (at the Broadhurst) and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (at the Lunt-Fontanne), both aimed at kids and each with diametrically opposed artistic faults. One is too sumptuous, the other too stingy.

The youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II is an unlikely candidate for the Disney-princess treatment—after all, she was brutally slaughtered by the Bolshevik secret police in 1918, when she was seventeen years old. But that’s the premise of the Twentieth Century Fox animated film from 1997, which hoped to board the money train established by Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” The movie picks up on the legend that Anastasia survived the revolution—a theory fanned by several imposters who claimed to be the missing princess, most notably a mentally ill woman named Anna Anderson—and recasts the Romanov Grand Duchess as a plucky knockoff Belle, an amnesiac urchin who comes to realize she is royalty. Rasputin made an appearance, too, as a mustache-twirling villain whose sidekick is an albino bat voiced by Hank Azaria.

The Broadway show wisely drops Rasputin and the bat, but otherwise draws heavily from the cartoon and less so from another Fox property, the 1956 film starring Ingrid Bergman. In what was once St. Petersburg but is now Leningrad, Anya (the clear-voiced Christy Altomare) joins up with a pair of con artists, Dmitry (Derek Klena) and Vlad (John Bolton), who plot to escort her to Paris and pass her off as Anastasia to the exiled Dowager Empress (Mary Beth Peil). Along the way, Anya’s amnesia dissipates, and she realizes that she’s Anastasia after all. In Darko Tresnjak’s production, everything is incredibly overblown, from the screensaver-like cityscape projections to the score, by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (“Ragtime”), who never met a pop ballad that they couldn’t top off with a sweeping high note. Act I ends with the earworm “Journey to the Past,” a hit from the movie that was rerecorded by Aaliyah and bears distinct traces of “Part of Your World.” Prepare to have it stuck in your head for three days. Historical license doesn’t quite cover the liberties taken, and in this riches-to-rags-to-riches tale there’s a great deal of romantic nostalgia for imperial Russia: balls, gowns, music boxes. If you bring a small child, you might get some thorny questions about the October Revolution. What did those rioting hordes have against pretty, pretty princesses?

There’s a Russian oligarch in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” too, if you can believe it: the Putinlike father of Veruca Salt (the amusing Emma Pfaeffle), who herself has been refashioned into a tyrannical prima ballerina. Other golden-ticket holders have been updated as well. The gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde (Trista Dollison) is now a YouTube pop star from L.A. in a bedazzled tracksuit, and Mike Teavee (Michael Wartella) is a Twitter addict who hacks Willy Wonka and calls people “losers.” You may be relieved to know that Augustus Gloop (F. Michael Haynie) is still just a fat German kid who loves sausages. Creepily, all four are played by adults.

There’s pure imagination, and then there’s overthinking it. That’s what seems to have happened with this musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale, which was heavily retooled after a glitzy West End outing directed by Sam Mendes. For Broadway, the reins were handed to Jack O’Brien, no stranger to spectacle. But the new production feels like the result of late-night script meetings and second-guessing. The artistic choices don’t seem wrong so much as exasperated, though two are particularly unfortunate. One is to open the show with Willy Wonka (Christian Borle) telling us that he’s decided to hand his factory over to a successor, and then going undercover as the proprietor of a candy shop. In the first ten minutes, we’ve lost the anticipation for Wonka’s entrance and the surprise ending.

We’ve also got too far into Wonka’s thinking. Gene Wilder reportedly agreed to star in the indelibly trippy 1971 film version on one condition: that he make his grand entrance limping on a cane, only to tumble into a glorious somersault, “because from that time on no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.” His Wonka was bewitching because he was unreliable—a Cheshire Cat with a flair for doublespeak. He was the funhouse. Borle, who’s given smashing comic performances in “Something Rotten!” and “Peter and the Starcatcher,” is, on paper, the man for the job. But he hasn’t picked a strong enough take on Wonka, playing him as a showman with an incongruous sadistic streak. By the time he reëmerges in full purple regalia, at the end of Act I, there’s no mystery to him.

The other big miscalculation is the factory itself, which we finally glimpse after intermission. It’s less a cabinet of wonders than a featureless box. Set pieces are minimal. The edible landscape where Wonka sings “Pure Imagination” is a smallish terrarium, and the chocolate river that engulfs Augustus Gloop isn’t even visible. The idea, I think, is for us to project our wildest dreams onto a blank slate—and to ward off the London production, which Ben Brantley compared to an overstuffed Toys R Us—but that’s not exactly how imagination works. (“Peter and the Starcatcher” showed how a scrappy story-theatre approach could concoct a wondrous Neverland out of ropes and sheets.) In one scene, the group must mime its way through an invisible obstacle course—a clever sequence that would have worked even better if the rest of the factory wasn’t basically invisible as well.

The effort to rejigger the story into something new has also opened a few plot holes. If Wonka is all washed up, as Charlie tells us, why does his golden-ticket contest spark an international frenzy? When the local candy man reveals himself as Wonka, does Charlie recognize him? Despite its problems, the show is still watchable, in part because Dahl spun his modern fairy tale so nimbly. (His relish in showing the nasty side of children and adults is a welcome antidote to most kiddie culture.) And it has some real bright spots. There are catchy songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”), interspersed with the wonderful Leslie Bricusse–Anthony Newley songs from the 1971 film. The downtown puppeteer Basil Twist, who should have been given the run of the whole thing, wittily designed the Oompa Loompas. And the veteran scene stealer Jackie Hoffman, as a boozing Mrs. Teavee, sneaks in some zingers. As her Trumpian boy dives into Wonka’s TV trap and the Oompa Loompas come on to sing his elegy, she deadpans, “The little people are singing again. That’s never a good sign.”