Neverland Can Be Found If You Look To the Pantages

Update: The show continues at the Pantages Hollywood until Sunday March 12th with best availability on the 7th, 8th, 9th.

There’s so much more to Finding Neverland than a new musical about the creation of one of the most enduring modern day fairy tales, Peter Pan. As I learned from watching it, and discussing it on my radio show and with friends and people that have seen it or know the story…well, how much more it is is up to the viewer.

The nuts and bolts of the show would start with the book by James Graham and Music and Lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy telling the story of author J.M. Barrie, the creator of the magical world of Peter Pan; or at least the interpreter of the stories. It’s not the dark, brooding atmosphere of the movie of the same name with Johnny Depp nor is it a super-glossed bit of fluff avoiding anything troubling.

Because no matter how you tell it, the story behind the story is troubling. There’s death from horrible disease, there’s suicide, war casualties, orphans and pain; there’s untreated depression and lots of impropriety for the time.

But there’s also magic and whimsy, laughter and optimism, wonder and joy; it all depends on what you bring to the table.

Barrie, a married playwright, basically meets four boys in the park while walking his dog and strikes up a friendship. In today’s world red flags would go off right away with just that. A grown man that likes to play with younger kids in a park during the day, sometimes unsupervised? Then there’s the friendship with their father and then newly widowed mother, a friendship that transcends the norms, a friendship that would end in Barrie getting joint custody of the children upon her death.

But it’s those children, and their play, that inspired Barrie to write Peter Pan and to create Neverland and Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys and Captain Hook. And while Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the parents of the boys, George, Jack Peter, and Michael were living their lives (the parents would die within three years of each other) Barrie was there to take the every day and turn it in to a story that is still being remade to this day with all of Barrie’s proceeds going to a children’s charity still.

Now, many make the mistake of thinking that Peter Llewelyn Davies is Peter Pan, the boy that could fly, who wouldn’t grow up, but as the musical illustrates, it is Barrie that is truly Peter, truly the eternal child, a Victorian Michael Jackson if you would (and look at the controversy that surrounded him and, ironically, Neverland Ranch).

The play has to leave the adult themes of insinuated adultery, infidelity, even the appropriateness of an older man befriending younger kids, mostly at bay, and rightfully so. This isn’t THAT story. Finding Neverland seeks out the magic that has to be at the creation of anything so enduring, so fundamentally appealing that it has entertained millions for over a century.

Billy Harrigan Tighe plays Barrie with the right amount of childlike wonder in the guise of a functioning adult. He longs to sing, to dance, to write, to laugh, to play, while so much of his life tells him to do just the opposite; to sit, to listen, to be reserved and respectable. Christine Dwyer as the widow Davies is charming and engaging, a mother to her boys and to Barrie as well, a care giver until the end with no room for fairy tales until she needs one the most. Their love can’t take center stage, as they both must focus on the well being of the boys through it all.

And it is the boys that rule the night, along with a dog. The boys were Ben Krieger as Peter; Finn Faulconner as George; Mitchell Wray as Jack and Jordan Cole as Michael. And a fun fact about the dog trainer, he is the renowned theatrical trainer William Berloni. His dog Nellie won the 2016 Cannes Palm Award for Best Animal Performance in a film for Paterson. That is the only major award given to animals in films.

The kids add the needed magic and wonder to the production, to the songs to it all. They serve as a constant reminder that the story is what you make it and that sometimes, if you believe hard enough, a flickering light can be a winged friend.

This is a play for young and old, for those still with plenty of imagination and those needing a reminder that a little imagination can be a good thing. It’s not a historically accurate depiction of the creation of the work, but it stays close enough for a Broadway Musical. Yes, in real life one brother would be lost to the war, one to suicide (Peter) but on the page, and on the stage, they never grow old, never grow up and death is merely a trip off to Neverland.

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