CHAPLIN - the MUSICAL A musical in 2 acts: music and lyrics by Christopher Curtis; book by Christopher Curtis and Thomas Meehan based on the life of Charlie Chaplin. Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego - September 7 - October 17, 2010 (As Limelight) Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway - 10th September, 2012 - 6th January, 2013 (24 previews, 136 pers) SYNOPSIS He came to America an unknown. He left amidst scandals and controversy. In between, Charlie Chaplin became one of the best-loved and most famous entertainers in the world. From the gritty streets and smoky music halls of London to movie screens across the world, Chaplin goes behind the camera to show how a comic genius found soaring success and later fell from grace. Chaplin provides a captivating close-up on the man who changed motion pictures forever. STORY Nearly a century ago, in 1913, Charles Spencer Chaplin, twenty-four years old and all but penniless, arrived in Hollywood. He was an unknown, small-time, London music hall performer taking on a fifteendollar-a-week-job as a supporting player in Mack Sennett’s two-reel slapstick movies. Within eight years Charlie Chaplin had become the most famous man in the world as well as one of the richest, having produced, directed, written and starred in his first feature-length film, The Kid, in which he played the role of the Tramp. Chaplin deals with this amazing man and his astonishing rags-to-riches career. It is a richly melodic and thrilling new musical that tells the Chaplin story from his beginnings in utter poverty in the slums of south London, all the way to his last years as a maligned exile in Switzerland. But Chaplin is not in any sense strictly biographical. Instead, moving backward and forward in time, it explores the inner Chaplin and how an obscure nobody became Hollywood’s greatest and most talented star. The audience might be surprised to discover a painfully wretched childhood that included his father’s death from drunkenness, his mother’s descent into life-long schizophrenic madness and his own four years in a brutal Dickensian workhouse for boys. Nonetheless, Chaplin overcomes his youthful sorrows and converts them into cinematic art. Chaplin is really about a man who had to become the most famous man in the world before he could find happiness by becoming his true self. It is a bright, often funny, happily tuneful and ultimately moving new musical. Thomas Meehan MUSICAL NUMBERS 1. Overture/Prologue - Hannah; Oona; Sydney; Alf; Hedda; Max; Young Chaplin; Usher 2. Look at All the People - Hannah; Young Chaplin 3. Whatcha Gonna Do? - Charlie; Hannah; Jackie Coogan 4. If I Left London - Charlie; Sydney 5. Sennett Song - Charlie; Max 6. Look at All the People (Reprise)/Tramp Discovery - Charlie; Hannah; Jackie Coogan 7. Tramp Shuffle - Part 1 - Charlie; Max; Usher 8. Tramp Shuffle - Part 2 - Charlie; Max; Usher 9. Life Can Be Like the Movies - Charlie; Sydney; Usher 10. The Look-A-Like Contest - Charlie; Hannah; Sydney; Alf
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