Theater: Little Chaps’ Littlechap

Stop the World—I Want to Get Off is a kind of Everyman coloring book for quasi-grownups. Color Everyman’s face white with flour. Dab on a maraschino-cherry nose. House him in a circus tent, and dress him in clown pants baggy enough to hold a pair of baby kangaroos. Name him “He” or “The Man.” Make him walk like a mechanical doll, and then propel this symbolic cipher through a life cycle from the cradle to the grave that seems to take almost as long to stage as it would to live through.

Britain’s all-purpose star Anthony Newley, who with Leslie Bricusse wrote the book, music and lyrics for Stop the

World, calls his everymanikin Mr. Littlechap. Newley mimes a good bit of Littlechap’s saga in an imitation of Marcel Marceau. Marceau knows the art of saying more with less: Newley says less with more. Though Littlechap periodically shouts “Stop the World!”, he is not an Angry Young Everyman. He marries the boss’s daughter (she is pregnant by Littlechap at the time), advances from a branch office to head of the firm, enters Parliament, is dubbed a peer, and even gets into the club of his choice. “Snobs.”

Domesticity irks Littlechap, and he has affairs with a Russian lady commissar, a German maid, and an American nightclub singer. There is less sin than smirk to these escapades. Playing the wife and all the other women in Littlechap’s life as well, Anna Quayle is a droll dreadnought of a female. In the most waspishly comic number in the show. Ty pise he Deutsche, she sprays the audience with Hitlerian gutturals.

To justify its billing as “a new-style” musical. Stop the World employs a Greek chorus of girls garbed in harlequin-style tights. They make anatomically diverting, if irrelevant, comment on the action. Newley is as amiable as he is indefatigable, and by musical’s end one has been through so much with his Mr. Littlechap that show and showgoer are knit in intimacy, the kind of factitious friendship that springs up between people who have shared a train wreck, or a bombing raid, or certain opening nights on Broadway.