Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Play)

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    Review: Flying High and Falling Hard in ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’

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    Aerial mishaps and half-wit actors turn a fantasy classic into a farce. But, like Peter, not all of the jokes land.Six years ago, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society brought its production of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” from its home base in England to Broadway. Mayhem ensued. Part of the manor collapsed. An actor was poisoned in a prop mix-up. After the leading lady was knocked unconscious by a door, she was replaced by the stage manager; when knocked unconscious as well, he was replaced by a sound technician and eventually, somehow, a grandfather clock.The company has grown up since then, or down, or perhaps just sideways. Rebranded as the Cornley Youth Theater, and for reasons of liability or just sheer embarrassment no longer associated with a polytechnic institute, it has returned to Broadway with its children’s version of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” Many of the same disasters happen chez Darling as happened at Haversham Manor, or close variations on them. Let’s just say that Peter doesn’t fly so much as flail while airborne. He, too, is knocked unconscious.And so may you be, with laughter, especially if you did not see the earlier show, which despite its disguise of amateurism was a highly polished production called “The Play That Goes Wrong.” For the Cornley players (like the Cornley Theater) are of course fictitious, part of a tradition of farcical comedies featuring terrible actors that goes back at least to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” which opened Wednesday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, with a game Neil Patrick Harris in a guest role, the jokes and mishaps are still funny, if not quite as magical the second time around.For one thing, if you are already familiar with the Cornley modus maloperandi, you will spot some of the setups the moment you take your seat. That’s assuming the panicked performers, bickering in the auditorium preshow, let you sit.Onstage, the Darlings’ nursery looks as if it were built on a budget not greater than the cost of a ticket, with a rickety three-level bunk bed, a wobbly casement window and wiring that’s already sparking before the lights go down. The “flying operator” credit in the Cornley program inspires little confidence: “Not yet known.” And the turntable that will deliver the children to Neverland looks just as likely to deliver them to the emergency room.Perhaps 500 things go wrong in “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” some of them nearly fulfilling Peter’s prediction in the Barrie play: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Peter spends much of the play upside down or in bandages. Nana, the Darlings’ Newfoundland-slash-nursemaid, gets trapped trying to squeeze through a dog door, and has to be chainsawed out. Nor is this the first time the actor playing Nana has faced an onstage disaster. In the Cornley production of “Oliver!” some years ago, he squashed the title character.Greg Tannahill as Peter Pan, who spends much of the play upside down or in bandages.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Nana is haunted by the memory — and that each of the other actors has a pathetic trait as well — helps give texture to the relentless shenanigans. Still, as the formula seems to require, the “Goes Wrong” shows often get near and sometimes cross the line at which violence and mockery cease to be funny. That line moves over time, of course; if stuttering no longer seems amusing, it was a surefire laugh-getter not long ago.And though it’s always hilarious to see floorboards fly up and smack actors in the face, the professionalization of fake trauma may have outstripped the comedy of it. The difficulty of producing a stunt safely is not, after all, related to the amusement it provides; in fact, the difficulty, when too obvious, can get in the way. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” directed by Adam Meggido, too often belabors the horseplay, making it feel mechanical.Milder but more endearing are the jokes that depend on miscues, amateur acting and erratic stagecraft. The chair that is meant to deliver the narrator (Harris) to and from the stage sometimes jerks him too suddenly into position and other times makes an excruciatingly slow exit. Harris, who will appear at most performances through April 30, is expert at consternation that turns into helplessness.And Dennis, the young Cornley actor playing John Darling and Mr. Smee, “who doesn’t know a single line,” must have his words provided through headphones; he repeats them verbatim, even when they’re clearly not meant to be spoken. “Dennis, you’re wearing the wrong costume,” he declaims proudly. “No, don’t say that, that is obviously not a line.”In such moments, “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” begins to achieve the dizzying liftoff of the best backstage farces, like Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.” In the confusing atmosphere where real life, the play and the play within the play meet, you feel unmoored from the customary gravity of the theater. Words make very little sense, especially when, as happens blissfully once or twice, the dialogue slips out of alignment and one actor jumps ahead while another stays behind. (That also happened in “The Play That Goes Wrong.”) And when Mrs. Darling and her maid are declared to be “different in every way” though they are quite obviously played by the same flustered actor, disbelief is more than suspended. Wonderfully, it’s shattered.Matthew Cavendish, right, with Neil Patrick Harris, whose misbehaving narrator’s chair provides some of the production’s endearing jokes, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, the reprieve from the weight of meaning is only temporary. Too often, the belaboring rebounds and you crash back to earth as ungracefully as Peter Pan. Several bits depend on a setup too outlandish even for farce, which works best when the conditions are real but the responses extreme, instead of the other way around. When sound cues are somehow switched with recordings of offstage conversations and even audition tapes, it’s too far-fetched to amuse.Still, the cast makes even the dimmest jokes shine; you admire the polish. The play’s three authors, once drama school chums, have given themselves the best roles. Henry Shields, the choleric, John Cleese-like one, plays Mr. Darling and Captain Hook; Henry Lewis, the haunted teddy bear, is naturally Nana; and Jonathan Sayer is the headphoned idiot who barely belongs on a stage.They have all by now honed their shticks into weapons. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has been playing off and on since 2013, and the “Goes Wrong” brand has been incorporated as Mischief Worldwide. Perhaps that growth has now begun to drain some joy from the franchise, which is built not just on endangering amateurs but on loving them and even to some extent being them. Death may be a big adventure, but for bumblers, which is to say all of us, unvarnished life is adventure enough.Peter Pan Goes WrongThrough July 9 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pangoeswrongbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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      In This ‘Peter Pan,’ Something Always Goes Awry. That’s the Plan.

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      On a recent afternoon, the actor Greg Tannahill sat perched atop a London rooftop, one leg extended, one arm outthrust. A pair of carpenters would then whisk Tannahill from his rooftop and into a nursery. And then out of it. And then back in again. A window frame would come free. Tannahill, now jerked upside down, would mewl and scream and clamber down a wall. Once he finally righted himself, the flight harness would wrench him upside-down again.This breathless, silly sequence lasted less than a minute and ended when Tannahill, playing an actor cast as Peter Pan in an ill-starred kiddie production, finally stands up straight and delivers the line: “Thank heavens I didn’t wake the children.”The routine requires split-second precision and the seamless cooperation of actors, flight operators and stage managers. To make it work and to make it safe (there is an open flame on set!), the creators and crew members of “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the spry, slapstick comedy that is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater on April 19, have spent dozens of hours (maybe hundreds of hours, counts differ) honing this one bit.“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is the second Broadway production, following the Agatha Christie- adjacent “The Play That Goes Wrong,” in 2017, from the theater company Mischief. Founded by three former drama school roommates — Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields — Mischief specializes in farcical deconstructions of established genres. Each new play is putatively the work of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a troupe of overambitious amateur thespians. Whenever the Cornley players take the stage, something inevitably goes awry. A lot of somethings. Mischief’s fascination is with the things (and people) that go bump in the night. People like Tannahill.Backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theater: Richard Force, a carpenter, helping Tannahill into his harness.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I’ve gained a bruise or two in rehearsal,” said Tannahill, once he had retired to his dressing room. “But you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a lovely omelet.” He then clarified that he hadn’t actually broken anything.‘Acclimate to the terror’I visited the Barrymore a week before the show’s first preview performance because I wanted to see the work that went into putting even one gag together. “Hours go into generating just 10 seconds,” Sayer told me.It was late afternoon, just before the dinner break, and the auditorium was littered with binders, monitors and makeshift desks. The atmosphere was one of controlled chaos, but no one seemed especially tense. (Many of the company’s members studied together at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.) Not even Tannahill, though he did ask, good-naturedly, for a moment to catch his breath before the carpenters swung him in again.“Just so I can acclimate to the terror that is that moment,” he said.That moment has been in the works for about 10 years, ever since “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” first opened at the Pleasance, a small theater in North London. Mischief had chosen a children’s show as the follow-up to “The Play That Goes Wrong” for two reasons. First, these shows have so many rules and conventions ripe for rupture. “You can’t really get more serious than a show that is intended for children,” said Henry Shields, as he and his collaborators speed-ate a dinner of pasta and salad. “The moral standard of these shows, it is extremely high.”The second reason was the flying rig. With characters suspended high above the stage floor, what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot.When the show debuted, at the Pleasance, the company couldn’t afford luxury gear. The rented rig had no counterweight, so when they wanted to lift Tannahill, who originated the role of the actor playing Peter Pan, a crew member had to jump off a stepladder. To have Tannahill enter at the appropriate speed, a couple of actors would hold his feet, pull him back and let him go.Honing a sequence: Jonathan Sayer, one of the founders of the Mischief theater company, compared their process to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“The low-tech version of the show was much more dangerous,” Shields said. “I mean, it was safe, we took care, but there were more bruises.”In this low-tech version, things actually did go wrong, unscripted things. At one point, a screw fell out and a door broke away, jamming the revolving stage just minutes before curtain. At another performance, a dummy version of Peter Pan fell to the floor prematurely. (“Don’t worry,” Tannahill ad-libbed. “That’s just the other dead Pan.”) One night, Sayer, playing one of the children, forgot to loosen a button on his costume. When his own rig jerked up, it choked him.“I remember being very out of breath and quite shaken and looking up expecting to see you all looking very concerned,” Sayer recalled. “Everyone had tears rolling down their faces with laughter.”The company now takes rehearsals and personal safety just a bit more seriously. “With age and experience comes much more care,” Sayer said. “When you’re 21, you say, ‘Let’s just go for it!’ Now, there’s a lot of poring through everything at an extreme level of detail to get it right and to make sure that we’re safe and well and happy.” (He and his collaborators are now seasoned men of 34.)Mischief managedFor a “Goes Wrong” play to work, the production has to chart an exact course between mayhem and control. Too much polish and it isn’t funny. “Especially on a big Broadway show, people are so hard-wired to be like, ‘Well, this is how it’s done. This is how we’ll make it clean, neat, tidy.’ You’re quite often trying to unpick those things. Like, ‘No, no, let that moment be messy. Let the shirttails hang out,’” Lewis said.But too little refinement and the jokes don’t fly. If the doors slam — and slam and slam — but the story isn’t told, the audience won’t laugh. With each new production, the director, Adam Meggido, includes at least one rehearsal in which everything goes right. “You need to be able to do the thing and to have total control over it before you can start to undercut it,” Sayer said. “You’ve got to make sure the story of ‘Peter Pan’ is being told before you start to rip it up a little bit.”Matthew Cavendish, who plays Max, in bunk beds that collapse, naturally.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAnd then, second by second, joke by joke, the ripping begins, in a process that Sayer compared to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second. “Comedy is hard,” Shields said. “Jokes are hard. You have to be very precise.”Still, that precision has to allow for differences in the layout of each new theater and for the addition and subtraction of actors and understudies, who have to be afforded the space to play the roles in their own ways, even while hitting every line and mark. Besides, Lewis, Sayer and Shields have never met a joke that they didn’t believe they could eventually improve. Ten years on, they’re still tweaking, refining and adding new bits. “You’re never finished writing comedy,” Shields said, sounding slightly exhausted. (At one point he had described Mischief’s style as “a bottomless pit of comedy.”)The fine-tuning ends only during the technical rehearsals, when any further changes would give the designers, board operators and stage managers conniption fits. I found them a few days before that, during what Lewis described as “that fun, exhilarating part of the process where we’re trying to get those last few changes through.”Where the magic happensAn assistant stage manager led me across a confetti covered set to a narrow backstage area that magically held a half-dozen people. The carpenters stood behind a bank of monitors. One grasped the ropes that controlled Tannahill’s horizontal travel; the other his vertical axis. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has upgraded since its Pleasance days. The rig now came courtesy of Flying by Foy, the industry leader. (In a neat bit of symmetry, Peter Foy, of Flying by Foy, designed the rig for Mary Martin’s celebrated “Peter Pan.”) It would take both of them, three stage managers and an offsite flying manager to guarantee Tannahill a smooth journey. Which is to say, one in which every bump and inversion is intentional.Tannahill says he enjoys all the pranks, even being turned upside-down. “It’s quite therapeutic,” he said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesTannahill claimed to enjoy all of it, even the moments in which he was turned upside-down. “It’s actually quite nice,” he said. “Gets the blood circulation going in a different direction. It’s quite therapeutic.”At rehearsal, he oriented himself precisely on a roof. At a cue from Tannahill, a raised hand, the operators swung him through the window. This was the carpenters’ 20th time with the sequence, maybe the 30th, and it ran without a hitch, though without the necessary force.“Can you slap him into the wall?” Sayers said to the carpenters. “He used to really thwack into the wall.” The sequence had to look out of control while the actual control remained perfect. If Tannahill seemed to be in real danger, the audience would feel too anxious to chuckle. But if he came in too slow, they wouldn’t laugh either.They tried it again. This time Tannahill did smack into the wall. The wrong wall. The sequence reset. “Because that happened in rehearsal, it was very controlled,” Tannahill later reassured me. “It didn’t give me a bruise straightaway.”The third time, the sequence, in fairy-tale fashion, went just right. When Tannahill flipped upside-down for the second time, the cast and crew cackled. How did it feel to have finally nailed the timing and the trajectory, to have his colleagues laugh at his discomfort?“It feels great,” Tannahill said. “It makes all the bruises worth it.” More

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      British Comedy ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’ Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The farce, by the team behind “The Play That Goes Wrong,” is about a bumbling theater company attempting to stage the popular children’s play.Six years ago, the Mischief Theater Company arrived on Broadway from Britain with “The Play That Goes Wrong,” a madcap comedy about a hapless amateur theater company attempting to stage a whodunit.That farce was a success, with outlandish physical comedy that led to a Tony Award for best set. A national tour was also successful, and a production has since been running Off Broadway.Now Mischief is planning a return to Broadway with “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a sort of sequel in which the same theater company attempts to stage J.M. Barrie’s beloved play about a boy who doesn’t grow up.“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is scheduled to start performances March 17 and to open April 19 at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater. The play is planning a limited run of 16.5 weeks (the unorthodox run length reflects the company’s off-kilter brand).The comedy has already had a rich production history — it opened at a small theater in London in 2013, toured Britain in 2014, ran in London’s West End over the Christmas seasons in 2015 and 2016, and was adapted for a BBC television special in 2016. The show’s North American journey began last year with productions in Edmonton and Vancouver, Canada. It has had generally positive reviews: The Vancouver Sun declared that the play “has absolutely no redeeming social value. But at its height it offers a gag about every 10 seconds, many of them hilarious.”The play’s creators are Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, who also wrote “The Play That Goes Wrong”; the three will again star in their production. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” features the same slapstick sensibility as the earlier play, but has a bit more character development, and an even crazier set.“The fictional theater company is taking on a much more ambitious production, with flying, crocodiles and a revolving stage, and they put on the play with the same disastrous results,” Lewis said. “You get more behind the scenes into what’s going on with the characters, as well as all the farce and the madcap comedy.”The writer-performers said they are looking forward to returning to Broadway, and are mindful that the industry is in a very different place than it was when they were first there.“Before the pandemic, you could say that our work was very silly and not that important,” Sayer said. “Now I think this kind of work is very important — there’s something very profound in silliness right now, because that’s something everybody needs after what we’ve all been through.”The play is being produced by Kevin McCollum, Kenny Wax, Stage Presence and Catherine Schreiber. McCollum said he has been eager to transfer the show to Broadway for some time, believing that “people want to laugh.” More