This
Peter
Pan (adapted and directed by the widow of Dan Crawford, the
King's Head's onlie begetter, and starring his stepdaughter) is a
miracle of compression. Not all the cast of 22 can fit on to the tiny
stage at the curtain call. When fight scenes spill all over the
auditorium, for once it feels not in the least gimmicky but simply
necessary. However, this artistic shoehorning is most palpable in
respect of the production's unique selling point. For this is the
theatrical première of the full score written by Leonard
Bernstein; only five of the nine songs he wrote were presented in its
1950 Broadway run. Yet in order for it to fit the King's Head, musical
supervisor Mike Dixon has had to compress Bernstein's orchestrations
into arrangements for a trio consisting of piano, cello and
flute/piccolo/clarinet. It's a serviceable bit of work, and you can
hear many of the composer's original harmonic complexities in the
mind's ear. But hearing them all with the actual ear would be
preferable; you feel the lack, especially on the two or three numbers
which are more like brief musical sketches than complete songs.
Stephanie Sinclaire compresses (that word again) J.M. Barrie's play to
make room for the songs in a two-hour show. The main Neverland section
is exuberant, with Katherine Kastin giving the strongest performance I
have seen from her as an ebullient Peter. But there is no
countervailing sense of humanity among the "earthly" characters: the
Darling household is a place of camp, and Lisa Holliman's Wendy never
balances her wide-eyed wonder with the down-to-earth practicality which
makes her so in demand as a surrogate mother to the Lost Boys and even
Captain Hook's pirates. Nevertheless, it turns the most cramped and
uncomfortable theatre in London into a place of fun and fantasy for a
brief while, and when Peter made his famous appeal to the audience to
revive the dying Tinkerbell (Dixon's little daughter Meg, with the
cutest snub nose this side of the animated titles to
Bewitched) by clapping our hands, I
looked around to see that with only one exception even we hard-bitten
critics were all applauding like billy-o.
Written for the Financial
Times.