Not That There's Anything Wrong with That

Anyone happen to have seen the "Peter Pan Live" performance this past week?  Someone decided that a stage-set performance of the classic children's story would be a great thing to put on TV, live as an audience-free stage performance.  Of course, even though it was a children's story, it was put on by NBC as a 3.5-hour marathon ending far past bedtime for the age group for which the story was written.

That said, and given that it was probably more DVRed (as we did) than watched live, one has to wonder for whom this performance was actually intended.  I mean, I can get past the too-obvious wires and the production glitches -- it is a children's story for, well, children, right?

Maybe not.  This production had all the overt stage gayness (not that there's anything wrong with that) of The Producers, which would be fine otherwise -- in The Producers, it is meant to be satirical and is funny as heck -- but this wasn't billed that way, and one has to ask what NBC was thinking.

This starts with the odd performance of Christopher Walken as Captain Hook.  As a former stage performer, I'm looking at a televised, network live stage-set production and trying to see how the actors respond to that unusual milieu.  Walken, an otherwise outstanding actor, looked like he was mailing the performance in, or worse, directed to be a stereotypical old gay guy.  If you didn't see it, just imagine that it was dress rehearsal without a director, and Walken was simply running his dialogue and marking his spots.  That's what you got, the least energy imaginable.

What came across from the "why am I here" performance of Walken was to, at best, make a fop out of Hook and, at worst, feminize him.  To what end, we ask?  The protagonist is a boy (played always by a female) leading a group of boys; how is he supposed to be antagonized by a tired, wimpy Hook who dances oddly with his band of "men" and mails in his gestures?  Those of a certain age recall the performances of Cyril Ritchard in that role, which he created, a completely different take.

But has Broadway become that self-mockingly gay (not that there's anything wrong with that) that it can't even produce a children's story without bringing what, in The Producers is pure satire, into it?  Or have we, the audience, come so much to expect the foppish behavior of male stage characters, men dancing a bit to close together, too much male dancer body visibility, that even in a classic children's story, it has to be thus?

Based on the hideous reviews, perhaps not.

Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with that.
   
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton