Doctor Dolittle

Doctor Dolittle is a show you want to root for. Well-intentioned and whimsical, the musical is laudable in its depiction of humans getting along with our animal friends. It’s simple enough for children, who are clearly a large part of the target audience, and relatively fast-paced. Unfortunately, the show — which will be touring around the country through September 2006 — is not very entertaining. For all the colorful costumes and exotic beast puppets on stage, it never fully engages the imagination.

A good part of the blame lies at the feet of Leslie Bricusse, who penned the show’s book, music, and lyrics. His score is rather ordinary and the plot is less than involving, even though it hews more closely to the original Doctor Dolittle stories written by Hugh Lofting in 1920 and to the 1967 film starring Rex Harrison than to the 1998 celluloid version starring Eddie Murphy.

This version of Dolittle begins with the good doctor (Tom Hewitt) on trial for the murder of an elderly woman, and much of the first act is told through flashbacks. We learn how Dr. D. acquired his unique linguistic abilities and how, believing that it’s distasteful to eat one’s friends, he became a “reluctant vegetarian.” It turns out that the apparently victimized woman was actually a seal, whom Dolittle was helping return to her husband. The doc beats the murder rap and then, just like that, he is off on a new adventure to discover and converse with the Great Pink Sea Snail.

Here’s where the bigger problem lies: Due in part to Glenn Casale’s dull direction, one never senses that Dolittle is ever really talking to the animals. In the show’s original London production, the animals were represented by animatronic figures, but here they are puppets (designed by Michael Curry of The Lion King fame) manipulated by on-stage performers. Sadly, it’s clear to even the youngest theatergoers that the good doctor is chatting with inanimate objects rather than living creatures.

On the plus side, the show’s large cast — which features such established actors as Tony Yazbeck, Eric Michael Gillett, and Ed Dixon — is more than competent. Hewitt is sturdy as ever as Dolittle, and Nancy Anderson as his love interest Emma Fairfax shows off her beautiful singing voice. Tony Award-winner Ann Hould-Ward’s costume designs are impressive and Kenneth Foy’s painted backdrops effectively evoke 1840s England.

The show does boast a few memorable moments. In one scene, the doctor serenades a seal with a love song; and in the show’s most bizarre sequence, a two-headed, llama-like creature called a Pushmi/Pullyu performs what may be the first animal striptease in stage history. But the long-awaited arrival of the legendary Sea Snail is a disappointment, as is the Giant Lunar Moth that provides the Doctor with transport.

Doctor Dolittle attempts to teach little ones about the horrors of animal cruelty, but it comes across as preachy. The kids in the audience on the night I attended the show at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music spent most of the evening fidgeting in their seats or crawling under them. Surely, this was not the reception that the producers of this $3 million production hoped for.