With minimal artifice beyond a length or two of rope, a playful bunch of actors, the wonderfully descriptive lighting of Jeff Croiter and a pair of percussionists, a treacherous storm at sea is whipped up.
What Peter does still offer is a captivating antidote to the theater-as-theme-park experience exemplified by Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Not every show is a natural fit for theatrical primetime. However, like Timbers’ Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson last season, which was a hit downtown and then struggled on Broadway, Peter suggests that producers need to think beyond a handful of good reviews while assessing transfer viability.
The show was developed by Disney Theatrical, which serves here more in a licensing capacity than as a hands-on producer. The transfer was one of this season’s early casualties on Broadway.īolstered by wide readership of the bestselling novels, Peter might find more traction and draw young theatergoers, possibly benefiting from its Disney pedigree. By contrast, the musical Lysistrata Jones had a scrappy insouciance that was fresh and effervescent in its site-specific Off Broadway staging, but it looked feeble under a brighter spotlight. The musical Once, which also came to Broadway this season directly from New York Theatre Workshop downtown, negotiated the move with its idiosyncratic appeal intact, albeit with some inevitable loss of intimacy. The cast – versatile and likable though they are – now have to work harder to keep the constant volley of silly jokes and winking contemporary anachronisms airborne, and the effort shows. But in scaling up from a theater seating less than 200 to one with a capacity of around 1,000, the show’s larkish pantomime spirit has become strained.
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