Australian performer Marcel Cole brings a grace and ingenuity to a story that’s been told often, although not with great success: The 2012 Broadway musical “Chaplin” starring Rob McClure (featuring none of Chaplin’s songs) ran for just four months; the 1992 movie “Chaplin” starring Robert Downey Jr. cost more to make than it earned at the box office. Both were impressive in their way, not least because of the title performances: I still remember how McClure walked a tightrope, played the violin, roller skated with a blindfold on, even did backflips while holding a drink. But both were too large and ambitious to do what Cole does with his modest Fringe show – allow us to experience directly Charlie Chaplin’s playfulness and his sense of mischief.
Yet while “Smile” is largely fresh and inspired, at the very end it makes the same mistake as those expensive epics.
“Smile” begins with a re-creation of one of Chaplin’s great silent movies, “The Gold Rush,” with intertitles projected on a screen, accompanied by a typical silent movie score, while Cole, in heavy white makeup, dresses like the Little Tramp, and moves like him; he exhibits a mime’s superior skills – walking in place, leaning against an imaginary bar; the works. He doesn’t work alone. He enlists members of the audience to play all the other characters; he suddenly dresses one theatergoer in a policeman’s helmet and badge and gives him the club to beat him with; he puts a fancy hat and fur stole around a woman who becomes his love interest.
It’s fun, and clever – and becomes even more clever, when “The Gold Rush” reaches “The End.” And then Cole brings forth a hefty book – Chaplin’s autobiography — and treats moments in his life in the same way that he had re-created scenes from the movie. We learn of his childhood poverty, of his mother’s having gone insane (he whispers to the volunteered member of the audience to stare blankly into space and then pant like a dog); we learn how he busked on the street, and started working for Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, which toured to New York – where Mack Sennett saw him, and took him to Hollywood. Cole then blows through the pages of the autobiography (much like the leaves of the calendar float by in an old-fashioned movie) to indicate the passage of time.
“Smile,” in other words, doesn’t try to show everything; how could it in an hour? Yes, we see his courtship of just one of his four wives; but it’s the last one, Oona O’Neill (daughter of Eugene), the longest-lasting.
Yet, although it skips around, “Smile” seems to have the same urge as those Broadway and Hollywood biographies, to present Chaplin’s life from birth to death, even though its running time is less than half the length of either of them. So, the show delves into his anti-fascist activism during World War II, and the post-war backlash in America that resulted in his being banned by the U.S. government, forcing him into exile in Switzerland. Cole makes some effort to switch tones — projecting movies of war, playing an actual audio of Senator Joseph McCarthy attacking Chaplin rather than having an audience member portray him – but that feels jarring, and it still feels trivializing. I think I understand the dilemma: How could he leave out “The Great Dictator,” and if he puts that in (he includes the balloon, and the final speech from the film), how can he leave out Chaplin’s anti-fascist activism or then leave out the backlash? But a similar argument could be made about his songs: Why did Cole just sing “Smile,” which Chaplin initially composed for “Modern Times?” as an instrumental, with the lyrics added later? “Smile: The Story of Charlie Chaplin” might have been more effective if Cole had made some hard choices in favor of what makes his show stand out.
**** Smile: The Charlie Chaplin Story is playing through August 24 at Pleasance Courtyard as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
