The last time I saw Peter Pan and company onstage (just last year), the Boy Who Never Grew Up was played by a post-menopausal woman, Capt. Hook was a foppish dandy in pristine Victorian garb and Tinkerbell was little more than a lighting designer’s wet dream.
Oh, how things have changed. Fly, the new musical adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Edwardian children’s fantasy, does to Peter Pan what he has long needed: It bitch-slaps the annoying little sprite into the modern era.
Originally, Peter Pan was an adventure tale, where children could fly away to a world without grownups … until they realized grownups aren’t so bad and returned home.
But Peter kept soaring off, ready to live the life wary young kids didn’t have the balls for. He was their surrogate while they remained responsible.
Fly, which was adapted by Rajiv Joseph, fiddles with that formula. Peter (Grant Venable, an actual tween this time) is still the self-involved id run amok; this time, though, Capt. Hook (Bradley Dean, pictured right) isn’t some growling meanie but a scummy, slightly pitiable pirate going through a mid-life crisis. He hates Peter primarily because he doesn’t grow up — or grow old. He doesn’t deal with crow’s-feet and arthritis and career malaise.
And Wendy (Isabela Moner, pictured), rather than the sensible school marm in the making, is an angry tomboy who longs to leave her home and forget the death of her baby brother. Yep, the bespectacled tyke is worm food — and Nana, Tiger Lily and lots of other dead-weight have been trimmed in a re-imaginging along the lines of what Wicked did to The Wizard of Oz.
Along the lines, but not the same. Wicked benefited from a magnificent score and even more magnificent lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Joseph doesn’t have a lyricist’s ear, and the rhyme schemes are repetitive and banal (though Bill Sherman’s tribal-rhythmed score is quite fun). And director Jeffrey Seller complicates many of the special effects (when you call yourself Fly, there’d better be a lot of flying, but the harnessing can look awkward). But when Moner and Dean are onstage, you forget all of the shortcomings and wallow in what this production does best: make complex characters out of stereotypes we had long stopped thinking about as real. Finally Peter Pan isn’t just for the kiddies; it’s for the adults who still wish they could have it all.
Wyly Theatre, 2400 Flora St. Through Aug. 18. DallasTheaterCenter.org.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 19, 2013.