By Megan Graves**
“To live is the greatest adventure!”- Peter Pan
Some of the cast of Peter Pan’s Great Adventure.
For skeptics like I was, who might wonder why the writers Chase Ramsey and David Paul Smith created another Peter Pan musical, you will be pleasantly surprised by the play “Peter Pan’s Great Adventure!” at the SCERA. The play is different than the familiar musical in significant, positive ways. There was more interaction with children in the audience, and that was the key part of the children’s enjoyment who attended the play. Don’t just take my word for it! According to children who came, “it was really fun,” they “liked how [the actors] interacted with the crowd,” and how “[the actors] were good at acting like children.” In the words of one child, “Everything!” about the play was his favorite.* Considering that this is a play written for young audiences, the fact children enjoyed it is a very good thing, but don’t worry, adults – you’ll enjoy it as well.
I’m happy to see the SCERA engaging in a renaissance of the unique essence of live theater – audience interaction – that has gotten a little lost over the years since Shakespeare’s time, but fortunately is making a popular comeback in some local theaters. In this play, Peter Pan (Dallin Major) gets rid of the ‘fourth wall’ right away and starts interacting with the audience, asking the children, “Can you help me let my friends know the show is starting?” In other parts of the play, the children get to try scaring Captain Hook (Shawn Mortensen) by acting like a crocodile, or bymaking a bird’s call as a signal to the pirates when the Lost Boys were near. It is also a much shorter play, which along with the constant interaction with the cast, makes it a lot more amenable to bringing young children, though it is even enjoyable for teens and adults who are young at heart.
I like this version a lot better than the original musical, for a variety of other reasons, namely, because it has no racist undertones against Native Americans and it doesn’t have strange melodies in the songs like the original has. On the contrary it has more than one catchy song, and not only that, all of the songs have an inspirational message of one sort or the other. It doesn’t have as many characters, and at times some of my favorite parts of the Peter Pan story seemed rushed because of time, such as the scene where we all clap in the audience to help Tinkerbell live, and Peter Pan doesn’t really fly across the stage, but overall it was better in general in terms of plot, music, and audience interaction.
Almost every song or part of the story teaches children a simple positive lesson, such as this one, for example: “We can find love in all sorts of places, we just need to know where to look for it.” So, if you want some wholesome values and life lessons reinforced through music to your children, this is a good play for that!
The first song, Mother’s Lullaby, is an example of lessons within a song, while also containing foreshadowing for the adventures the children will have that night, where they “wake upon the shores” of a strange land. Speaking of which, there is an unintentional lesson in this Peter Pan story in general for parents, and that is this: Don’t leave the dog to babysit children when you leave. 😉 One song sung by Peter Pan teaches kids that “the happier the thought, the deeper the love, the lighter you feel!” and that they “can be up in the sky (and achieve what they want), all they have to do is try!” In that song, the set design and direction was also clever, because the children “flew” by being pulled in tiny carts made to look like the tops of English buildings.
Speaking of design, one of the first things I noticed was the great use of lighting design by Elizabeth Griffiths. Tinkerbell is a hard character to portray on stage, and she was cleverly portrayed by both a green laser and handheld green lights, which the actors did a great job concealing the rest of the time. When Peter Pan is chasing his shadow, the lights change right as he finds it and his shadow appears – it was very clever and good timing for the lighting – kudos also to Stage Manager Danielle Berry for a relatively seamless first night of a world premiere of a new musical.
The set design by Shawn M. Mortensen for the Darling’s house was beautiful, with bay windows and old paintings, and was easily converted to the Lost Boy’s hideout by just hiding the bunk bed under a fabric set piece, or transformed into a pirate ship quickly by taking off a picture to reveal a porthole, for example. It was a little distracting to have some of the same set pieces in all the scenes, but it also connected all of the scenes together in a way that you could say the adventures were a dream that the children had.
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I could go on for a long time about everything I loved about the play, from the clever slapstick acting by the three pirates, Smee (Keegan Briggs), Smaug (Delayne Dayton), and Bucky (Ardon Smith) that made the children laugh a lot, or the fairy-like voice of Wendy Darling (McKayla Hansen), or the energy and optimism that Peter Pan instills in the audience, or the way they incorporated my favorite classic lines from the original story along with new ones such as “Forever sounds like an awfully great adventure!” but I’ll just encourage you to go and see the world premiere of this play for yourself. You might even want to go twice.
The book was written by Chase Ramsey, with Music and Lyrics by David Paul Smith, both locals and both co-directors of this show for SCERA’s Theatre for Young Audiences Program.
You can see the play every Monday and Friday through Feb. 26, at 7 p.m. each night. It lasts about an hour and a half at most, so it is an optimal length of a play for kids. Just remember that, like Peter Pan says, “Cell phones make Tinkerbell mad.”
***Advisory: There are a lot of flashing lights on stage during a few scene changes. There is also one instance of crude bathroom humor reference that adults would get and not children, but that is all.
Tickets are $6 for adults, $4 for children and seniors, available at (801) 225-ARTS or at this link: https://www.scera.org/events/peter-pans-great-adventure-2/
The SCERA is located at 745 S. State St. in Orem.
*Nephi Barlow, Grace Barlow, Sam Barlow, and Owen Whiteley were the children quoted, in order respectively.
**Megan Graves has directed, produced, written, and performed in various community plays in Utah (http://www.singforsomething.org/), and also enjoys being a freelance arts critic. She majored in both English and Music Teaching, and has a Master’s in Public Administration. She particularly loves watching and performing in Shakespeare plays and in musicals, and is grateful for the chance she had to study and critique theatrical performances in London for 7 weeks in an undergrad theater program at BYU as part of her English major.
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