Off Broadway Performer of the Month: Paddington Bear (With Costume Changes)

CLOTHES MAKE THE BEAR You may not recognize Paddington Bear without his trademark blue duffel coat and floppy red hat, but that’s him in a scene from “Paddington Gets in a Jam” at the DR2 Theater on Union Square.

DON’T EVEN ASK WHY Paddington is baking a cake at his next-door neighbor Mr. Curry’s house. Especially because when our favorite bear reads that the recipes calls for two cups of sugar, he throws the cups themselves, not just their contents, into the mixing bowl. That move, along with Paddington’s uncertainty about how much “self-rising powder” to use and various other innocent mistakes, could lead to disaster.

A GRUMPY DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Mr. Curry (A.J. Ditty) is not happy to see his neighbor Paddington at his front door.

But that’s the whole point in “Paddington Gets in a Jam,” which Laurel Graeber’s review in The New York Times called a “charming, cheerful family show” and awarded a coveted Critic’s Pick check mark.

It’s a one-hour tale with two human actors, one fuzzy puppet (Paddington’s puppeteers — Jake Bazel, John Cody and Kirsty Moon — aren’t seen until the curtain call) and a string of funny household mishaps.

Mr. Curry (A.J. Ditty) tricks Paddington, who has just dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar, into helping him clean the house before his great-aunt Matilda arrives. (Mr. Curry overslept, and the place is a mess.) Actually, he tricks Paddington into doing all the work.

A BEAR, A DUCK, A PLUNGER Paddington prepares to tackle cleaning the bathroom, dressed in his yellow slicker. He politely consults the rubber duckie first, of course.

Paddington fans in the audience can look forward to seeing London’s most polite, most soft-spoken, most accident-prone bear flood the bathroom, accidentally vacuum the draperies off the window (and Mr. Curry’s treasured artwork right out of its frame) and do pretty much everything wrong while trying to bake a cake to replace the one he accidentally destroyed. Putting up wallpaper in the bedroom doesn’t go well either.

HOW DO YOU TURN THIS THING ON? OH! Paddington has never used a vacuum cleaner before, and he accidentally pulls down (and sucks in) the window draperies.

Young theatergoers and their parents should not expect Paddington’s origin story — the one where he somehow travels from darkest Peru to England and is found alone in Paddington Station with a monogrammed suitcase and a handwritten note on his coat: “Please look after this bear. Thank you!”

In this scenario ( a word that LS, my sophisticated 6-year-old theater guest, used afterward, and I was so shocked that I didn’t comment on it), all of that happened long ago. Paddington is all settled in, happily living with the Brown family, who adopted him.

EVERYTHING UP HIS SLEEVE From left, Paddington, Jess Bulzacchelli (as Aunt Matilda) and Ditty.

Oh, and there’s a cute (but doomed) magic show at the end.

“Paddington Gets in a Jam,” by Doug Kmiotek, created and directed by Jonathan Rockefeller, DR2 Theater, 103 East 15th Street, paddingtongetsinajam.com 1 hour (no intermission). Opened on Dec. 13, 2019. Limited run. Closes on March 8, 2020.