FANTASMAGORICAL: CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

The cast has yet to arrive in town, but the star of the show's already on stage in the spotlights, the center of everyone's attention.

She faces forward, then glides 90 degrees to show her profile, practically preening like a fashion model.

 Director Ray Roderick sits in the audience, surrounded by men gripping walkie-talkies or wearing headphones. In front of him are monitors, laptops, a tangle of wires and plugs.

Everyone's eyes are on the stage.

The object of their unwavering attention: a long, cylindrical roofless car with running boards, a folded-down windshield, red spokes on the wheels, and headlights that bulge out like a frog's eyes.

It's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the magical flying car of children's literature. The 1964 book was made into a movie in 1968, then, in 2002, became a stage musical in London. In 2005, the UK show traveled around Europe and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" opened on Broadway, where it was nominated for five Tony Awards.

Mr. Roderick's job, as director of the U.S .national touring production, is to turn the Broadway musical into a traveling national musical without losing any of the magic.

PHOTO JIM MCLAUGHLIN / FLORIDA WEEKLY Co-sound designer Nathaniel Hare(f)-Head Sound Engineer Chris Walters(r) check sound levels before rehearsal starts.

Not everything that worked on Broadway — including the car flying out above the audience — can f transfer to smaller, temporary theaters across the U.S., he says.

He's trimmed the show to make it a little tighter and more roadfriendly. But he's not skimping on the theater magic.

For that purpose, they rented the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall a month in advance to prepare and rehearse the musical before taking it out on the road. Roderick and 50 others spent a month at the Mann Hall before the actual production debuts there on Nov. 15 and 16, with three shows. (The musical then plays Fort Lauderdale, goes on to Tampa, and then other cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, PA, Albuquerque NM, and Costa Mesa, Calif.)

It is, says Mr. Roderick, one of the most technically complex musicals.

PHOTO JIM MCLAUGHLIN / FLORIDA WEEKLY Director Ray Roderick.

"It's brand new technology," he says, between cues. "It's very tedious mechanical work … that we spent months prior to this month, building.

"It's staggeringly complicated and can be frustrating at times — it's very tedious work. I spent eight hours in a warehouse programming one minute and 10 seconds, that's how tedious it is."

And he still wasn't satisfied with the results.

"I've been at this for a year, putting this show together," he reveals.

And on they labor.

Through hard work, technology, lighting, masking, and the magic of theater, the car appears to fly, to have a personality all of her own.

She is, after all, the titular character of the music, an honor given to only a few, such as "Evita," "Sweeney Todd," "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Mame."

"When the movie was made," Mr. Roderick says, "it was the time of filmmaking: VistaVision, CinemaScope. People were doing things in film not done before."

He wants to have the same effect onstage.

"We want to capture the joy of storytelling that was so infectious," he says. "That's why we remember these movies. It was a musical first, to try to optimize the scope of that on a stge."

Naysayers claimed a national American tour couldn't happen, that the show was too difficult, too complex to tour.

"The thought of it!" Mr. Roderick says. "'Couldn't be done.' 'So many technical requirements!'"

When it toured in the UK, he says, it took them two weeks to load the show in. (Most shows begin load in on a Monday, to be ready for opening night the following evening. It's a rare show — such as "The Phantom of the Opera" — that takes a week to set up before a show can open.)

"They had to go through the deck, the floor of the stage, to fly the show," he says.

They wondered, at one point, if the stage at the Mann Hall could hold the weight of all their sets and equipment.

"This is Florida," Mann Hall general manager Scott Saxon reassured them. "We don't have basements. That's a concrete foundation there."

"It's taken us hours and hours to make it look like it can fly," Mr. Roderick says. "The story is the musical and the characters. We have to … make the car do what it needs to do."

The story, of course, is of an eccentric inventor, Commander Pott (Potts in the musical) who has a wife, a boy and a girl. The family gets a car when the commander is successful inventing a candy that also works as a whistle. The inventor fixes up the car, which also seems to have a mind of her own. The plot includes spies and a child snatcher. The car, named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the sounds it makes while starting up, can also function as a motorboat and fly.

The car's extended abilities shouldn't be too surprising once you learn that the author of this famous children's book is also the creator of a famous spy who had gadgets and cars that could do miraculous things: Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond series.

"James Bond meets the turn of the last century," Mr. Roderick says, laughing. "It's not the same character … but it's the same adventure, with a great story of good versus evil.

"It's still a love story at heart, and, as folks say, the car is the show. It is true to the character. We humanize the car in this version. She's a catalyst for an entire family coming together, a family falling in love. A machine that does miraculous things, overcomes this huge conflict."

The local production includes six local kids who had to audition for the show. They spend a good amount of time on stage, 15 to 20 minutes, and, as Mr. Roderick points out, not only do they get to step out onto the Barbara B. Mann stage, but they get a chance to work with Broadway professionals.

"It's exciting. It's great for these kids to have an opportunity to step on stage with a delightful musical that has a lot to say," Mr. Roderick says. "It's so driven by characters. And these are Broadway veterans they get to work with."

Mr. Saxon echoes Mr. Roderick, pointing out what a great experience this is for local budding actors, to have so much stage time in a production of national touring Broadway show. He also likes to point out how much the show has contributed to the local economy, because those who were here for a month stayed in hotels, ate meals at restaurants, and possibly visited local shops and movie theaters.

Mr. Roderick, whose parents have a place in Estero, was already familiar with the area.

"I spend a lot of time down here. I love it here," he says, pointing out that the area has what he considers the prettiest beaches in the world. "And this is the perfect theater for us to be in," he adds. "It has a big enough stage to get a show on, yet it's a small enough house so we can talk to each other. It's a big show. So it's great to see this show in this theater. It feels so intimate."

Mr. Roderick is distracted for a few minutes by what's happening on stage. Everything is planned down to the second, as if it's the Olympics.

"It obviously beats working for a living," he jokes. "It's great fun. We work very, very hard, and it's mind-boggling. Lots of pieces to put together. It has its stressful moments. But it's so rewarding, so joyous, what we do for a living. And the community of folks we work with is like no other, the fellowship of the theater.

"The people working backstage? They've got seconds (to respond to cues), there are things going on underneath the deck, many things you don't see. They're big kids like we are too."

But in the end, it's all about the car.

"Talk to any dad when he kicks the tires, lifts the hood," Mr. Roderick says. "He looks under the hood whether he knows what's going on or not.

"We can never upstage the central story. The car is part of the family. We're all infatuated with the automobile.

"I think that's why the story holds up."

Rereading 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'

I remember reading "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" when I was a kid, and I remember seeing the movie too. The onomatopoeia may have appealed to some, but I remember thinking it was a pretty silly name.

Dick Van Dyke, in the movie, was pretty silly too. But then, I'd seen him in "Mary Poppins." "Bye Bye Birdie" too. He was just a goofy guy, I reasoned with my kidlike logic.

So when I learned the national tour of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," the musical, was going to rehearse and start its tour here at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall this month, I decided to re-read the book.

It'd been a couple of decades since I'd originally read it (never you mind how many) and I was curious to see how it'd hold up.

The book, of course, is different than the movie, but the book came first, so that's why I chose to return to it.

It happened immediately when I opened the book and saw the title page: the years just somehow melted away. I remembered how, as a kid, I'd been so impressed with John Burningham's illustrations. They were in black and white, so I'm guessing they are pen and ink illustrations. But the way he drew the car on the title page just captured my attention.

It's a kind of image worthy of Eadweard Muybridge: a stop-action illustration that shows how the car has flown from the left page to the right page. To me, as a kid, it looked like a photograph, even though I knew the Pott family was drawn, because they had that kind of line drawing cartoonlike look about them. (The family's name was changed from Pott to Potts for the movie version, which came out in 1968. I'm guessing movie producers didn't want the family to have a name that made people think of drugs.)

The drawings, though I hadn't seen them in decades, were instantly familiar to me, and felt comforting to look at. (The Pott family is a very quirky family, and you can't help but like them.)

The illustrator, John Burningham, went on to become one of England's top illustrators. The man, whose work is known worldwide, received two Kate Greenaway Medals (the UK version of the Caldecott Award.) He also, by the way, is married to Helen Oxenbury, an award-winning children's book illustrator herself.

"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," believe it or not, is written by Ian Fleming. Yes, that Ian Fleming. The creator of James Bond. No, the Pott children don't ask for their chocolate milk shaken, not stirred. But the title character of the book is a car that can do all sort of things that normal cars can't. This one can turn into a motorboat. It can fly. It possesses tracking radar. It seems to have a mind of its own.

And there are bad guys and intrigue and plenty of adventure in the book.

It was, from what I've read, originally a bedtime story Mr. Fleming told his children.

I fell in love with it from the first sentence — the story's narrator has a voice you instinctively trust. And the first sentence seems to be a precursor to Lemony Snicket's books (who periodically uses a word and then defines it for his readers.) Here's how "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" starts:

"Most motorcars are conglomerations (this is a long word for 'bundles') of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and gasoline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. Smoke comes out of the back of them and hornsquawks out of the front, and they have white lights like big eyes in front, and red lights behind. And that is about that — just motorcars, tin boxes on wheels for running about in.

"But some motorcars — mine, for instance, and perhaps yours — are different. If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don't scratch their paint or bang their doors, if you fill them up and pump them up when they need it, if you keep them clean and polished and out of the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you MAY find, that they become almost like persons — MORE than just ordinary persons — MAGICAL PERSONS!!!"

How can you resist an opening like that?

That's a narrator you can trust and want to stay with to the very end.

Which I did.

I'm looking forward to the musical, but I'm glad I revisited the book.

And I'll try to live my life by Commander Pott's words: "Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes,' otherwise you'll lead a very dull life."