For my fellow millennials, the 1993 film “Mrs. Doubtfire” is a cultural landmark. It said a mother was allowed to want a divorce, even if her husband was as charismatic and funny as Robin Williams. It was more honest about divorce being permanent than other family fare on the same subject, e.g., “The Parent Trap.” And its San Francisco setting, with paradisiacal shots of colorful Victorians and soccer on Crissy Field, made the city look like a magical place to live. 

But its central conceit, that a divorced dad disguises himself as an elderly Scottish woman so he can nanny his kids, has aged less well, which makes it a curious choice for a musical adaptation in 2024. It reinforces the noxious stereotype that anyone who doesn’t conform to clothing rules for the gender they were assigned at birth is doing so in order to deceive. It implies that a right-wing illusion, of men running around in dresses, is real.

John O’Farrell and Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick’s musical, which opened July 2, at BroadwaySF’s Orpheum Theatre, seems like it wishes it could use other source material. Directed by Jerry Zaks, it shadowboxes its way through key plot points and memorable shots from the film as if it has to so it can stage the new scenes it’s actually excited about. That opening sequence where Robin Williams’ Daniel Hillard is voicing a cartoon? Now Rob McClure half-heartedly impersonates a few celebrities. A few scenes later, when Miranda Hillard finally declares she wants a divorce? Actor Maggie Lakis is such a nonentity, and the production around her is so noncommittal, that it’s as if she doesn’t really mean it. 

Allow the show to depart from the film, though, and imagination blossoms. When Daniel, in a jaw-ballooning mask as Mrs. Doubtfire, tries to cook a meal, he looks up how-to videos on the internet. The glorious resulting number, “Easy Peasy,” conjures the glitchy, too-perky timbre of instructions written by ChatGPT and the jarring frustrations of pop-up ads that won’t go away. The clangs of pan lids, in Lorin Latarro’s choreography, spark a tap number. And when Daniel goofs around on the set of a TV studio where he’s gotten a job as a janitor, the show finally doesn’t ask McClure to equal Williams — a punishment for any actor — but devises a fresh sequence that lets him come into his own, complete with beatboxing and loop machine. 

Still, other songs are as forgettable as background music in pharmaceutical commercials. Singers bark or fizzle out.

And retrograde material continues to grate. A WeightWatchers joke somehow dug its way out of the crypt to make the cut. We’re still asked to laugh at the sight of Daniel in a flesh-colored bodysuit with prosthetic breasts and buttocks, as if women’s body parts are inherently ridiculous and so are the trans women who acquire them. 

One second-act number, “You've Been Playing With Fire,” almost seems to metatheatrically comment on all this. We’re inside Daniel’s head now, at a moment of panic, and a bunch of Mrs. Doubtfire clones flood the stage, whacking him over the head with their handbags. It’s like a moment of gender nightmare performance art breaking through an otherwise conservative show, suggesting how gender norms are inculcated in all of us: via pummeling, to loud insistent beats, till something has to give.  

Reach Lily Janiak: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com