Real-life husband and wife Rob McClure and Maggie Lakis are juggling parenting their just-turned-5 daughter, Sadie, and life on the road with a touring Broadway show.
On stage, they play a very different couple: the recently divorced Daniel and Miranda Hillard, locked in a custody battle for their three children.
A bit of the real couple might come through in the couple they portray in the musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which Broadway In Tucson is bringing to Centennial Hall Tuesday, May 28, through June 2.
“What I think the audience can pick up on and what makes it easy for us is that we don't fake the long history together,” McClure explained during a phone call last week from the tour’s stop in New Orleans. “We have a chemistry and rapport that goes back two decades now that the audience can feel.”
This is the seventh show that the couple has done together since they met on the set of “Grease” in New Jersey in 2004. It’s their third Broadway tour; they also starred in “Avenue Q” that played Tucson in 2007.
“Mrs. Doubtfire” is a musical version of the 1993 rom-com starring Robin Williams and Sally Field as the Hillards. After Miranda is awarded custody of the couple’s children, Daniel, a down-on-his-luck actor, hatches an elaborate plan to dress as an older English woman and convince his ex to hire him as the kids’ nanny. The plan gets him closer to his children and, through the experience, makes him a better father.
McClure said adding music to the show allows them to tap into the family dynamic and the struggles the children are going through. One of his favorite scenes, McClure said, is his duet “Just Pretend” with Daniel’s oldest daughter Lydia (Giselle Gutierrez in her professional theater debut) right after he loses custody of his kids.
Throughout the 2½-hour performance, McClure does a head-to-toe transformation from Daniel to Mrs. Doubtfire 31 times.
“Audiences love a dramatic costume change and there is no more dramatic costume changes than this show,” Lakis said, especially since most of those occur “in front of the audience so it creates this live farce that works great on stage.”
The couple has been touring with the production eight months and will continue through the summer. Lakis said she will leave the show at the end of August when their daughter begins kindergarten at home in New York; McClure will stay on until mid-October, ending a five-year run with the show that started with workshopping it before taking it to Seattle and then Broadway in March 2020, opening days before the pandemic shut things down for two years.
He was nominated for a Tony for best actor in a musical in 2021, his second Tony nomination after getting the nod in 2013 for his titular role in “Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin.”
“This is pretty close to the original production,” he said of the show we will see next week, which will feature several Broadway cast members including Aaron Kaburick as Frank Hillard; David Hibbard as Mr. Jolly; and Jodi Kimura as Janet Lundy.
“They’ve assembled a real A-list company,” McClure said. “You are getting a first-class cast with this production, and I am thrilled to have stayed with it. I’m thrilled to ... be able to bring that performance around the country.”
But McClure admits that when he first started this journey in 2019, he was a bit intimidated taking on a role made famous by Williams, arguably one of the most beloved comic actors of his generation in what has become an iconic role.
“It was super daunting, but also the best kind of terrifying. I get to take a swing at one of the greatest roles in film comedy of all time, live on stage,” he said. “I knew that the best tribute I could give to Robin Williams was not to do sort of a lame impression. If it becomes a tribute act, you are just throwing focus to the fact that you are not the guy that everybody loves playing this part.”
Instead, McClure said he found a way “to differentiate myself while trying to make the audience feel the way that we remember (Williams) making us feel, that’s what I’m after.”
“To tap into that sensation. … If that’s what I can achieve, then that’s the greatest tribute I can give to him,” he said. “I’ll never be able to fill those shoes, but if I can get the audience to sign the permission slip for me to follow this character for 2½ hours and bring something new while tapping into what made it so nostalgic and special to them, then that’s the experience the audience can take away.”
