The story simultaneously being told and celebrated is as elaborate, simple, cozy and scary as the best bedtime stories are. “Peter” is all about storytelling as a lively (and live) art, and the energized complicity that’s forged between the teller and the listener. Not that there’s anything archaic or distant about the enveloping energy that emanates from the stage.
Timbers, one of this play’s directors, was responsible for the steampunk-emo musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”) Like recent movies like “Hugo” and “The Artist,” “Peter” is in love with the simpler, and perhaps fuller, magic once wrought by its artistic ancestors. Think of it, if you will, as Steampunk theater.
(Donyale Werle is the set designer.) And much of what happens there would not have been out of place, at least spiritually, in the fairy-tale Christmas pantomimes that delighted children then. The Brooks Atkinson proscenium has been tricked up to suggest a Victorian music hall. Barrie invented the character of Peter Pan. Though “Peter and the Starcatcher” sometimes speaks in 21st-century locutions, its theater craft would be familiar to audiences from the early 20th century, when James M. What’s more, it reminds us that we always have the tools within us to achieve that objective, if we know how to locate them. As staged with unending inventiveness by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers (with movement direction by Steven Hoggett and music by Wayne Barker), the production is also an enchanted anatomy of the primal human urge to defy gravity.
Adapted by Rick Elice from Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s 2004 children’s novel, this play tells the story of how a nameless, angst-ridden orphan became the immortal Peter Pan.
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