On a recent night at the Savoy Theater in London, the 1,100-capacity audience burst into applause when a crowd of actors rushed into the wings, leaving a tiny figure alone onstage.
It was a 4-foot-tall bear from Peru with a sign around his neck asking someone to “please look after” him.
As the set behind him transformed into a bustling train station, the bear began to sing — and the crowd gasped with delight.
Every few years, British theatergoers fall for a nonhuman star. In the late 2000s, it was Joey, the chestnut-haired title character in “War Horse.” More recently, they swooned at the woodland creatures in “My Neighbor Totoro,” a play based on the 1988 animated film.
But the title character of “Paddington: The Musical,” which is at the Savoy Theater through at least February 2027, seems to have trumped them all.
Patrick Marmion, reviewing the show for The Daily Mail, said that the “golden-fleeced” bear “triggers waves of rapturous delight.” Clive Davis, in The Times of London, noted that when Paddington tried on his trademark coat for the first time, it “drew a chorus of ‘Ahs’ around the auditorium.”
Paddington, a marmalade-sandwich-devouring mammal who dresses in a blue coat and red hat, has been beloved in Britain ever since the 1950s, when Michael Bond published “A Bear Called Paddington, a children’s book partly inspired by tales of young Jewish refugees. When a 2014 movie appeared about Paddington’s adventures in London with the Brown family, the bear’s fame only grew.
Luke Sheppard, the musical’s director, said in an interview that adapting Paddington felt like “a huge responsibility” given how cherished the bear is. If the team hadn’t managed to make him believable, Sheppard said, the show simply wouldn’t have worked.
Its plot is close to that of the first Paddington movie, with the young bear arriving in London and finding a home with the Brown family, only to meet a dastardly museum director who wants to stuff and display him. Yet Jessica Swale, the book writer, and Tom Fletcher, the composer, have filled it with moments of slapstick comedy and oddball songs, including one called “Marmalade” that’s an ode to the orange conserve.
The producers Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley said in a joint interview at the Savoy that when they began working on the adaptation about seven years ago, they considered using child actors or puppets to portray the bear. But neither approach worked. A puppet could be beautiful, Friedman said, but Paddington’s story — a bear seeking refuge far from home — demanded scenes where he was all alone. Having Paddington surrounded by puppeteers could have lessened the emotional impact, she added.
Lumley said that a breakthrough came when the pair visited Pinewood movie studios near London and saw creatures from recent “Star Wars” films: They realized they could have an actor in a bear suit onstage, with someone else controlling the bear’s facial movements remotely. (Friedman insisted that the final result was something far more magical than such a “reductive” description. “You’ve got to see it to experience it,” she said.)
Friedman and Lumley hired Tahra Zafar, a costume and puppet designer who has worked on numerous Hollywood movies, to oversee Paddington’s creation. Zafar said that making the bear had involved a team of about 25 people and three years of on-off “trial and error.”
During the development phase, Zafar said, her team finessed the mechanical technology that controls the bear’s facial movements so that he appears to sing with eyes closed and chin wobbling, like a regular West End performer. At one point, they pushed it so far that the bear’s face became eerily lifelike — “It was very uncanny valley,” Zafar said — and they dialed the technology back.
Even with bear suits ready for rehearsals, the actors — Arti Shah, who plays Paddington onstage, and James Hameed, who voices him offstage and controls his facial movements — had to get in sync. Shah said in an interview that she had spent many rehearsals watching Hameed closely as he sang so that she could mirror his movements.
Shah has performed in creature costumes before, but she said performing as Paddington still had its challenges. The bear’s head weighs five and a half pounds, she said, and it can get hot inside. (She prepared for the role by sitting in a sauna fully clothed, she added.) And she can see the stage only when Paddington opens his mouth, so she has had to learn to navigate the set largely blind. “I often count the number of steps,” Shah said.
During the show’s approximately two-and-a-half-hour running time, Shah is rarely offstage. Although reviewers have hyped up Paddington’s cuteness, Shah insisted that his impact also stems from her and Hameed’s acting.
Shah said that while preparing for the role, she took inspiration from her 8-year-old son, who shares Paddington’s curiosity and joy. For the scenes when Paddington feels rejected and alone, Shah said she drew on her own childhood experiences of being targeted by bullies because of her small stature.
“Paddington resonates with me,” Shah said: “He also wanted to be accepted and had so much to share and give.”
During the interviews, the creative team gave a host of explanations for audiences reacting so strongly to the character, including feeling nostalgia or sympathy for the immigrant bear.
Yet after a recent performance, a dozen audience members gave a simpler answer: Paddington seemed magical.
Lily Fuchs, 12, seeing the show with her family while on vacation from Minnesota, said that Paddington was “so cute” and that she had shivered in delight when he appeared onstage. She said she had assumed at first that a man onstage was controlling Paddington using “a big long stick” attached to the bear’s back. “Then the man walked away and I was like, ‘What? What’s just happened?” she said.
Gemma Wright, 44, said she had cried four times while watching the show, including when Paddington first put on his blue coat and shimmied with joy.
Watching Paddington wasn’t like seeing an ordinary musical, Wright said — it was like having every childhood dream coming true.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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