Peter and the
Starcatcher at the Brooks Atkinson Theater
Peter and the
Starcatcher, winner of five Tony awards (most notably for supporting actor
Christian Borle) has undergone a casting change. Borle has returned to film the second season
of NBC’s Smash, in which he plays composer Tom Levitt. Now playing Borle’s role, pirate captain
Black Stache (a different nomenclature to a Peter Pan villain I’m sure needs no
further description), is Matthew Saldívar, lately of A Streetcar Named Desire. If
any fans of the first productions of Starcatcher
are worried for the play, they need not be.
Although I never saw the play with Borle as the Stache, I can assure you
that the performance I saw was as entertaining and uplifting a play as I’ve
ever seen, threadbare production value and all, with
excellent direction by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers and a riveting score by
Wayne Barker.
Many
prequels (Captain Hook: The Adventures of
a Notorious Youth) and sequels (Hook;
Return to Neverland; Peter Pan in Scarlet) have been written to correspond
to J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play/1911 book Peter
and Wendy. The play looks to one of
the more popular prequels: Peter and the
Starcatchers (note the final “s”) and its sequels, written by American
thriller writers Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (who perform with Stephen King
and Matt Groening in the literary band the Rock Bottom Remainders). Though the Starcatcher books veer often from
canon, they are entertaining and fun, and Rick Elice (Jersey Boys; The Addams Family), who adapted them for the stage,
does not lose any of the series’ charm.
In Starcatcher, Peter—at the beginning of
the play known only as “the Boy” (and played by Adam Chanler-Berat)—is tossed
aboard the HMS Neverland with two
other orphans, Prentiss (Carson Elrod) and Ted (played at the performance I
attended by understudy Eric Petersen). The
cruel master of their orphanage is sending them to far-off Rundoon to be fed to
snakes to entertain the country’s king.
The Neverland is part of a
chain of two boats chartered by aristocrat Lord Aster (also an understudy, John
Sanders). The other, the Wasp, carries Aster and what seems to be
a chest filled with treasure Queen Victoria has instructed him to take to
Rundoon. In fact, the Neverland’s captain, Slank (Matt
D’Amico), has switched the trunk with one on board his ship, hoping to sell the
treasure to Rundoon’s king. Lord Aster’s
daughter, Molly (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and her nanny, Mrs. Bumbrake (Arnie
Burton in drag) are on board the Neverland,
and a nest of pirates led by the fearsome Black Stache and, of course, his
first mate, Smee (Kevin Del Aguila) are hidden on board the Wasp.
There is
swashbuckling, stormy weather, and shipwreck before the two parties collide on
remote Mollusk Island, and all is greatly enjoyable and accomplished
uniquely. There are no wires to allow
the cast members to fly (as they inevitably must), but when they do they are
lifted on shoulders or fulcrums. The
scenery is not expansive nor does it seem to be expensive, but every
fantastical occurrence is achieved through the cast’s ability to augment the
audience’s imagination. There is no
other show on Broadway that approaches narration as Starcatcher does, and it seems that none but Starcatcher, with its fanciful storyline and frequent—not to
mention successful—humor, could pull off such a feat. Throughout, however unbelievable the
situation, this ensemble brings us through to an altogether satisfying (if a
bit of a cop-out) ending. When the Boy
becomes Peter, who then becomes Peter Pan, though we knew all along it would
happen, somehow we’re surprised. Maybe
we never imagined that the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up could be drawn so
painstakingly, or spring from more imaginative origins.
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