Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher was a fresh breath of sea-salt air when it opened on Broadway three years ago. A “prequel” of sorts to J.M. Barrie’s popular Peter Pan, it told the story of how Peter, Captain Hook and Wendy came to be—and did so with a deliciously low-tech, story-theater sensibility. Elice’s script, based on a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, is an ocean of puns, alliterative dazzle, and anachronistic hijinks. And the staging was equal parts Steampunk and English pantomime, and 100 percent sparkling theatrical invention.
Not surprisingly, the directors behind the original Starcatcher were Alex Timbers, who displayed his theatrical wit in the short-lived, but brilliant musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and Roger Rees, who was smack in the middle of one of the great story-theater triumphs, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The imagination behind the original production garnered five Tony awards, four of them for design.
The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Peter, which opened this weekend after a run at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, gives a nod in the direction of the original’s imagination, but only a half-hearted one. To be sure, this isn’t a production with a Broadway budget, and the shift from a “picture-frame” stage to the Rep’s thrust stage, where the audience surrounds the action on three sides, involves certain compromises. But director Blake Robison and his design team seem interested in the visual magic of the show’s original concept, which makes the “story” part of the story-theater somewhat tough going, particularly in the first scenes.
In these, Elice sets up a narrative involving a pair of ships, a pair of steamer trunks, an evil captain, a good captain and his precocious daughter (along with her nanny), a group of wayward orphans and a magical cargo en route to the Kingdom of Rundoon. As envisioned by Elice, Timbers and Rees, it’s bravura storytelling, with a dozen actors whipping through minor costume changes and a variety of accents to create a world of seafaring adventure and fairy tale magic with nothing more than some rope and a few stage props.
Robison’s actors tackle these scenes with a good measure of snap and crackle (though it was clear that the Sunday performance I saw was the last of a very strenuous opening week), but his staging is less than magical and the storytelling elicits more “huhs” then “oohs” and “ahhs.” It’s up to the one-liners, delivered by the actors with goofy charm (particularly Jose Restrepo as Smee and Andy Paterson as the nanny, Mrs. Bumbrake), to keep things moving.
In the second act, we’ve arrived at the Kingdom of Rundoon, where plot plays second fiddle to extravagant kookiness, and the actors have a great time of it. Tom Story, playing the infamous Black Stache (soon to be Captain Hook), steals scenes with glee, and the charming romance between the boy who would be Peter (Noah Zachary) and Molly (Joanna Howard) blooms sweetly. It all ends in a pretty hilarious finale in which all the groundwork for Peter Pan’s story-to-be fall neatly into place. Ultimately, the Rep’s Peter and the Starcatcher offers plenty of puns, wit and adventure to satisfy those looking for some topsy-turvy yarn spinning–even if this production doesn’t exactly take flight.
