Peter Pan

Joanne · **Posted:** Sun Dec 22, 2002 5:08 am

Review in The Observer.

Quote:

Ever since English National Ballet evacuated its annual Christmas Nutcracker from the Festival Hall and took it across the river to the Coliseum, the South Bank and its impresarios have been looking for a family-friendly alternative. They've tried other ballets with familiar names - Cinderella, A Christmas Carol, The Snow Queen, Peter Pan (Atlanta Ballet in 2000). But none has worked well enough to replace The Nutcracker as a ritual treat.

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Emma Pegler · **Posted:** Fri Dec 27, 2002 5:46 am

No flights for Neverland

There's no bite, flight or insight in the droll but shallow new musical version of Peter Pan at the Royal Festival Hall, says a disappointed Paul Taylor

By Paul Taylor
The Independent

Quote:

A Peter Pan where the hero doesn't get to fly around on a wire is a bit of a contradiction – equivalent to an Esther Williams movie marooned on dry land or a Tarzan flick in which the loin-clothed beefcake fails to swing around the trees. That, though, is what is on offer in the new musical adaptation of Barrie's play at the Royal Festival Hall. Instead of a truly airborne Peter and a Darling clan who cause a lurch in the audience's stomach by levitating their way to Neverland, we get a boring simulation of flight with actors bending up and down on pedestals while a blue cloth is whipped about in front of them. You feel like climbing onto your seat and parodying them: "Flying? Look – anyone can do it!

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Dec 27, 2002 8:21 am

Peter Pan
By Michael Billington for The Guardian

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Peter Pan entered a no-fly zone. But the most extraordinary feature of this synthetically reductive musical, with score by George Stiles and lyrics by Anthony Drewe, is that Barrie's mythic hero becomes airborne only in the final seconds. That seems all too symbolic of a show that for most of the evening refuses to take wing.
Its sole redeeming feature is the stage presence of Susannah York as the story-teller. Looking something of an ageless Peter Pan herself, with her cropped hair and plum-coloured trouser suit, she guides us through Barrie's alarming masterpiece with wide-eyed curiosity. She invests the climax with genuine emotion as she confronts the dilemma of whether it is better to achieve conformist adulthood or be stuck in a state of arrested development.

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Peter Pan
By Peter Hepple for The Stage

Forget that the show is played in front of a 35-piece orchestra and that there is no flying, apart from a rather wobbly airborne appearance from Peter Pan at the end.

Director Ian Talbot, set and costume designers Will Bowen and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen plus lighting and sound men Durham Marenghi and John Del Nero have created a genuinely magical experience and ultimately a surprisingly moving one, in this production of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe's musical version of Barrie's tale, with a witty and intelligent book by Willis Hall.

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<small>[ 27 December 2002, 09:22 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>


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