Although it seems to have received half the viewers of last year’s live musical event, NBC’s “Peter Pan Live!” was a step up from “The Sound of Music” on a number of levels.
Its swirl of colors were tantalizing, the sound clear and music well recorded and I can’t imagine the trouble that went into making sets devised solely for cameras, not live audiences, so that one set gave way to the next, and all in real time.
Still “Peter Pan” is not one of the all time great musicals, many of its elements do not age well, and I was one of those kids who was flummoxed at an early age from seeing Mary Martin fly around the stage, with everyone calling her a boy. I never quite got the work’s gender confusion until someone explained it to me that the songs were written in such a key that a woman pretty much has to play the role.
If that’s the case, then Allison Williams was a fine choice, boyish, with a good singing voice and full of energy. Flying of course was the part everybody was waiting for, just so we could see the wires tangle up on live television. And while the wires were almost always in full view, somehow nobody got tangled before the cameras. In fact the technical glitches were surprisingly low. I caught one time when a floor director yelled “clear!” or when cameras pointed up at Peter flying only to catch a glimpse of the blinding studio lights above.
Christopher Walken, the other big element of the production, only looked like he was forgetting lines. Rather, he muttered things under his breath in character. And his own rhythms were so slowed-down compared to everyone else it only looked like he was halting. From Fatboy Slim videos we know Walken is a song and dance man, but something more is required to be Hook, I think, and that’s menace, of which he had little. He seemed to have even less energy as he went along. Pirates would have struck down his pale, exhausted frame long ago had they had an idea for mutiny.
As an enemy, he had less bite than the purple crocodile who kept coming around, although just about the same amount of flair.
There is no way this thing should have been stretched to three hours, though, and the incessant Wal-Mart ads that riffed on “Peter Pan” seemed to make Melissa Joan Hart a part of the cast. There seemed an odd arc to the story as well, over all that time. They join Tiger Lily, fight Hook, return home. And there’s that creepy ending where a grown up Wendy fobs off her own son to her former crush Peter. That the grownup Wendy is played by Minnie Driver might make us think she’ll put a plug in for her own NBC series “About a Boy.”
But generally, it wasn’t a terrible experience, might soften audiences for more live theatrical events and further the cause of musical theatre on television.