Monday, April 16, 2012
Theater The No-Budget Spectacle of Peter and the Starcatcher
Posted by Henry Stewart on Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 1:14 PM
Based on Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's children's novel, the play finds Peter (Adam Chanler-Berat, most recently seen playing Mark in Rent) as an orphan, before he has a name, stowed in the bowels of a ship, en route to be sold into slavery. Aboard this vessel, called the Neverland, he meets a young woman, Molly (Celia Keenan-Bolger), with whom he will battle pirates and protect precious "starstuff"—presumably, the source material for fairy dust.
Their Nickelodeon adventures, first on the ship and then on an island, are acted out with inexhaustible enthusiasm; co-director Alex Timbers (here, with Roger Rees) also brought such goofy giddiness to his previous Broadway productions, The Pee-Wee Herman Show and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Like those modestly scaled shows, Peter's spirited staging, its loveable inventiveness, serves as a rebuke to the extravaganzas occupying neighboring theaters. It reinforces a valuable moral: despite bloated budgets, no multimillion-dollar spectacle can out-wonder an imaginative mind.
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