“When you hear the name ‘Chaplin,’ you’re going to think comedy,” says Tom Meehan. “But it’s not really comedy. There’s very little comedy in it. The big trauma of his life was his mother going mad.”
Meehan is talking about “Chaplin,” the musical, bowing on Broadway this fall, he has written with composer Chris Curtis about the legendary silent-film comic. It’s a surprising admission: Like “Chaplin,” the name “Meehan,” brings to mind comedy, too. The former New Yorker writer is a great American humorist, winning three Tony Awards as the librettist for “Annie,” “The Producers,” and (with Mark O’Donnell) “Hairspray.” With that track record, he’s very much in demand. He has three shows coming this fall: “Chaplin,” a highly-anticipated Broadway revival of “Annie,” and the world premiere, in Hamburg, Germany, of “Rocky, Das Musical.” (While Sylvester Stallone claims co-writing credit on this musical version of his 1976 film classic, it’s really Meehan’s baby.)
“Chaplin,” however, is providing the greatest challenges. Not only is Meehan taking on a film icon, but the Chaplin estate is also putting pressure on him to tone down one aspect of the show: The tragedy of Hannah, Charlie’s mother. A young beauty with London stage ambitions, she was seduced by an older man, who whisked her off to South Africa during the 1890s gold rush. He impregnated and abandoned her there in short order. Only twenty, she turned to prostitution to earn passage back to England for her and her illegitimate son, Sydney. A case of syphilis would ultimately turn her mad. Chaplin, who was sent off to a workhouse at seven, was traumatized. “He spent his whole life looking for the love that his mother could never give him,” says Meehan. “You have to go into [the history] if you want to justify, to some extent, that all his early loves were sixteen or seventeen. He was fixated on this beautiful young woman.”
The long-gestating musical had a 2010 La Jolla Playhouse run under the title of “Limelight,” which drew crowds despite middling reviews. Meehan says that the musical has since undergone major revisions for Broadway. Rob McClure, who received glowing notices at La Jolla, will once again star as the Little Tramp. Meehan spoke to us about the risks of “Chaplin,” why the 1997 revival of “Annie” was a flop, and how “Rocky” may yet succeed, despite widespread skepticism.
Are you getting the Chaplin estate to see it your way?
I haven’t as yet. They’re pretty upset by it. But what was interesting about Chaplin’s life was that an awful lot of his big pictures were about his mother. In “City Lights,” the tramp goes to great efforts to get money to help the blind girl get her sight back. That was wish fulfillment on Chaplin’s part, to restore his mother to sanity. In “Gold Rush,” he rescues this girl who is a kind of hooker in a saloon. And in “The Kid,” he rescues the kid from being sent away to an orphanage, which parallels his own being sent away as a child.
How aware was Chaplin of his mother’s checkered past, especially since she was apparently in and out of his life a great deal?
He learned the details in a letter from an aunt when he was about sixteen. He had photographs of her as a beautiful young woman and this is who he had in mind when he went looking for someone to marry. The first two were gold-digging starlet types [ Mildred Harris and Lita Grey]. But his last wife, Oona, was, like Chaplin — quite complicated.
She was 18 at the time; he was 54, and in the midst of a sensational paternity trial with yet another young woman.
Her father [playwright Eugene O’Neill] threw her out when she went off with Chaplin. But they had eight kids and stay married for thirty-four years. His life is so fascinating, his genius, everything. I don’t know if we’ll ever get it up on stage ... the first act is his rise to fame and the second act is his decline.
How did you get involved?
Well, it’s sort of like a poker game that you keep staying in for another hand. Chris [Curtis] was a pianist at Chez Josephine Restaurant on theater row, and he was playing songs from this show he’d written about Chaplin. Mindy Rich [a producer] and her husband came into the restaurant, heard the songs and fell in love with the idea. Chris pursued me and I first came on as a mentor. Then they convinced me to write with Chris. And then I was going to quit and they asked me to write by myself and run drafts by Chris. I just kept staying in for another round, and now Broadway. Yikes!
James Lapine, who is directing the new revival of “Annie,” is known for his dark palette. Are we likely to see a more serious take?
It’s not darker, but it is different. He has a great ability to direct actors and to discover the subtleties of the text. “Annie” wasn’t written for children, it was written for adults. There’s an awful lot of politics in it. The Great Depression, the scenes in Hooverville, and the founding of the New Deal. We wrote it in 1972, three liberal Democrats responding to our deep dislike of Nixon. We thought, “Let’s write a musical about a President who cared about the country.” That was FDR [Franklin Roosevelt], and we put that in the context of the comic strip. Adults came to see the show and then brought their kids to it.
Why was the 1997 revival of “Annie” such a debacle?
Everything went wrong with it. Nell Carter [who played Miss Hannigan] turned out to be a terrible mistake. She’d been a great comic presence in “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and in a sitcom [“Gimme a Break”]. But she didn’t really have a good sense of comedy. She couldn’t get a laugh. And she had all sorts of problems with weight and other personal problems.
What did you think of Carol Burnett’s Miss Hannigan in the movie?
She was fantastic but so over the top and out of control. People have the idea that Miss Hannigan is some kind of crazy drunk. But she has to cope with all these problems. She has all the responsibilities of motherhood and none of the pleasures, so she takes a nip every now and then. The children, these tough little mugs, run the orphanage and she’s their victim.
Why did you want to work on “Rocky”?
When Sylvester Stallone first mentioned it to me, I thought, This is an absurd idea. But as I studied it more I realized that it has the kind of things that I always look for in a musical: a character who is larger than life who takes a journey. He wants to be somebody. And it’s a love story. It’s very autobiographical. He was an actor who had nothing going for him, so he wrote this. He says that he did it in three days.
Are we going to see the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and hear “Gonna Fly Now”?
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have written wonderful songs — they’ve even managed to write a song for an inarticulate Rocky. But yes, that song will also be in the show. The sets are now being figured out, but we will have a big fight scene at the end, and we do have a full-scale boxing ring. I know that people are thinking, “Oh my god! ‘Rocky 8,’ the musical.” They can hardly wait to see a fiasco! But it’s very heartfelt.
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