by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s much-ballyhooed live
telecast of Peter Pan on NBC. A
co-production of Universal (NBC’s affiliate under the Comcast octopus) and
Sony, this was an acceptable run-through of the classic 1954 musical version,
which took a much cuter and sweeter “take” on the material than I suspect its
creator, Sir James M. Barrie, had in mind. Peter Pan the character first
appeared briefly in a novel called The Little White Bird, written by Barrie for an adult audience (Barrie was
primarily a writer of what would now be called “rom-coms,” short for “romantic
comedies,” set in the England of his own time, but his stage works run the
gamut from rom-coms to out-and-out fantasies to historical dramas like The
Boy David — the Biblical one). In 1904
Barrie wrote an entire play called Peter Pan: Or, the Boy Who
Wouldn’t Grow Up, and its first production
in London was a smash hit. That one starred Nina Boucicault, daughter of
playwright Dion Boucicault, in the title role and established the tradition of
casting Peter as what would in opera be called a “trouser role” — a male
character played by a woman in drag. (British critic Gareth Hughes sniffed in
the 1920’s, “Why must it always be a peterless Pan?”) In 1908 Barrie’s
publisher extracted the four chapters about Peter Pan from The Little
White Bird and printed them separately, and
in 1911 Barrie wrote an entire novelization of the play — which he kept
revising until he authorized a final published version in 1928. I’ve never read
Barrie’s original novel or play, nor have I seen it produced (it almost never
is done in its original form), but I have seen the 1924 silent film, made by Paramount, directed by Herbert
Brenon (a largely forgotten director of the silent era whose reputation has been
handicapped by the loss of many of his films, including the 1926 version of The
Great Gatsby) and starring Betty Bronson as
Peter, Mary Brian as Wendy, Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily the Indian and the
great silent-era villain Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook.
In fact I’ve seen it
twice, once on the Kino DVD with the soundtrack provided by the Kino company
and again at the Organ Pavilion with Dennis James providing a live musical
accompaniment, and I love the 1924 version; I’ve called it “deeper and richer than
the more recent adaptations, full of complex emotions and overlaid with a hint
(though no more than a hint!) of burgeoning sexual attraction between Peter and
Wendy.” Alas, since that version (supervised by Barrie himself, who had star
approval and kept Paramount waiting for nine months while he disapproved of
every actress they proposed for the lead until they showed him the test of
19-year-old Betty Bronson), virtually all the adaptations since have
sentimentalized the material and moved it away from real emotions, emphasizing
the cutesy aspects of the material. Walt Disney put out an animated version in
1953 (Peter was voiced by child actor Bobby Driscoll, one of the few times it has been a petered Pan) and the next year a Broadway
musical version came out starring Mary Martin, who’d already proven in the
“Honey Bun” number of South Pacific
five years earlier that she could cross-dress convincingly and was petite
enough that she could be flown easily — since part of Barrie’s fantasy requires
that Peter and the Darling children (Wendy, the female lead, and her brothers
Michael and John), take a header out the Darlings’ second-story window and fly
to Never Never Land, where the bulk of the story takes place. The musical was
written by Mark “Moose” Charlap with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, though when that
version flopped in previews additional songs were added by composer Jule Styne
and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with Martin as Peter and the
marvelous British actor Cyril Ritchard (the murder victim in Hitchcock’s Blackmail in 1929) as Captain Hook. (An earlier Broadway
production from 1950 wasn’t a musical, though Leonard Bernstein provided
incidental music, and starred Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff — who
would seem the perfect actor for the role — as Hook.) The Martin version was
telecast live three times — in 1955, 1956 and 1960 — and the 1960 version was
preserved on videotape and reissued several times, once in 1973 and again in
the 1990’s when it was discovered on two-inch tape (no player then existed that
could run a two-inch tape; a non-working model of a two-inch videotape player was found in a Houston museum of
TV history and parts had to be hand-machined to get it in working order so the
tape could be played and transferred to modern storage media).
The show has
been periodically revived “live” with Sandy Duncan, Cathy Rigby and anyone else
they can find who can sing, dance and is petite enough to look credibly boyish
and be accommodated by the assembly of ropes, cables and harnesses needed to
“fly” on stage, and it was the basis for this version, though Adolph Green’s
daughter Amanda was brought in to provide three additional songs (which, quite
frankly, added little). This time around Peter was played
by Allison Williams — she didn’t really look all that masculine (more like a
1920’s flapper wearing a grass skirt) but she sang and moved well — with Taylor
Louderman as Wendy, Alanna Saunders in a Catwoman-esque costume as Tiger Lily
(whose band, in an unnecessary bow to political correctness, was changed from
“Indians” to “Islanders” and made to look Polynesian instead of Native
American; also, a new song called “True Blood Brothers” replaced “Ugg-a-Wugg,”
the original bonding song between Peter Pan and Tiger Lily. This misbegotten
example of political correctness run riot actually got a thank-you from one
Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American
Indian. These people want all entertainment to be sanitized and have all the
fun bleached out of it) and Christopher Walken as Hook. Walken’s presence was
the biggest element ballyhooed — and let’s face it, it’s not every day that an
Academy Award-winning actor with a serious reputation sets foot on a TV
soundstage to replicate a comic-villain role in a deliberately campy Broadway
musical. Walken was actually one of the show’s biggest disappointments; he
seems as if he got his whole idea of how to play a pirate (and even what to
look like as one) from Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of
the Caribbean movies, and though the script
feints at homoerotic attractions between Hook and his crew (particularly his
sidekick Smee, played by Christian Borle, who also doubles as the stuffed-shirt
father of Wendy and her two brothers), he’s hardly as daring as Cyril Ritchard,
who played Hook as an all-out screaming queen. (That went over my head when I
saw the Mary Martin TV show in 1960, when I was seven, and even in 1973, but
when the piece was revived in 1990 it seemed almost too obvious.)
Indeed, the weakest part of this Peter
Pan was it conveyed almost no sense of
terror; even the villainy had an element of “Don’t worry, we’re only kidding”
about this, and frankly I’d have liked to see Hook played as an all-out villain
to cut the cutesiness of the rest of the tale, the way Ernest Torrence played
him in the 1922 film — and Margaret Hamilton played the Wicked Witch of the
West in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, a story which pre-dates Peter Pan by a few years and is far more interesting, especially
since it’s a classic fantasy quest-narrative and its adapters embraced the
coming-of-age aspects of the original just about everyone who’s taken on Peter
Pan since Barrie has run away from.
Ironically, the most genuinely moving parts of the story as presented in the
NBC telecast of the 1954 musical of Barrie’s 1904 play are the ones dealing
with the Darling parents’ sense of loss over their children (later Barrie wrote
a fascinating fantasy called Mary Rose — about a young girl who disappears for weeks or even years; it’s not
clear what’s happened to her in the meantime, but when she comes back to our
world she hasn’t aged at all no matter how much time has passed in the normal
sphere — which when I read it seemed to have been his way of answering the question,
“But what about the parents of
the Lost Boys? What did they go
through?” Mary Rose also
fascinated Alfred Hitchcock, who for decades wanted to film it and got as far
as a preliminary script written with Jay Presson Allen, who wrote Marnie, but never got to make it) and the final scene,
based on an addition to the original play Barrie called “An Afterthought,” in
which Wendy is seen as an adult (played here by Minnie Driver), married with a
daughter of her own, when Peter Pan finally fulfills his promise to her to
return and takes Wendy’s daughter on her own Never Never Land adventure.
It
also didn’t help that the spirit of Julie Andrews hung so heavily over this
enterprise; all three of the female principals — Allison Williams, Taylor
Louderman and Kelli O’Hara as the Darling kids’ mother — seem to have adopted
her clear diction and somewhat exaggerated enunciation as their model for how
to sound convincingly “British” when they sang. (Peter Pan Live! was a follow-up to NBC’s previous “live” take on The
Sound of Music, which got rotten reviews,
mainly aimed at the star, Carrie Underwood, though all they could really fault her for was not being Julie Andrews.) And
whereas the Sound of Music
telecast had been a traditional TV adaptation of a live play, shot with
best-seat-in-the-house vistas from three cameras, Peter Pan Live! roamed throughout the studio and moved about through
the sets representing the various vistas — the Darlings’ house back in London
and the locales of Never Never Land, from the beach on which Peter and the
Darling kids land to the “Islander” encampment, the Lost Boys’ secret
underground hideout (which seemed to have been inspired by the one for the
villainous Cabinet ministers plotting to depose President W. C. Fields in the
1932 Million Dollar Legs) and the
pirate ship to which Hook takes the kidnapped Lost Boys and threatens to make
them walk the plank … Not all this was to the good; though it was fun to see a Busby Berkeley-like overhead dance
formation with men (though that had already been done in the Village People’s 1980
movie Can’t Stop the Music!), it
was not fun that the
ever-changing camera angles made it impossible for the lighting people to
conceal the ropes and cables suspending the cast members as they “flew.” Even
on our old, non-digital, low-definition TV the cords tying these people to
normal gravity were just too
obvious.
Where Peter Pan scored
was the excellence of the dancing — it’s nice to know all those kids taking tap
will have some chance at a
professional showcase for their skills — indeed, Christopher Walken’s halting
steps in rhythm looked even worse by comparison to the quality of the fully
professional (and amazingly good) chorus dancing behind him — and also the literally colorful settings; this was one modern production
that actually offered colors other than dank green and dirty brown! As far as
the whole thing was concerned, let’s just say that this Peter Pan was fun, but not as much fun as it could have been
if it hadn’t been played so relentlessly for cuteness — the whole moving
subplot of both Peter and Wendy feeling sexual awakenings in their attraction
to each other, a relationship that can’t be consummated because Peter refuses
to grow up and Wendy ultimately wants a home and family much like the one her
parents have, was delicately but brilliantly communicated in the 1924 film but
is almost totally ignored here. James M. Barrie wrote a charming fairy tale
(indeed, when his plays started falling off in popularity Dorothy Parker
attributed it to audiences getting tired of works whose virtually only audience
appeal was charm) but it had darker resonances — some of which he may not have
intended — and in each new adaptation the cutesy-poo stuff has been emphasized
more and more and the darker elements relegated to the cutting-room (or the
steno-pool) floor.
