Peter Pan Live!

The very notion of staging a live version of the Broadway musical version of Peter Pan for TV in this day and age was enough to generate publicity. Live TV is a phenomenon ripe for disaster and people knew well in advance that they were going to see a disaster.

They got that cheese-fest and substantially more in a horrific broadcast that was like sitting through three hours of a middle school play your kid isn't in. 'Peter Pan Live' makes Jersey Shore look like Masterpiece Theater.

The culprit in all this is the network NBC who evidently gambled they could get ratings just by staging an epic debacle that people would watch with the same fascination of rubber-neckers slowing down to check out a car wreck.

The sets were cheap. The make-up and costuming were atrocious. The acting was appalling throughout with performers seemingly always thrown out of rhythm by each other. The singing looked lip-synched in parts. The choreography was very often painfully out of synch.

Alison Williams in the title role kept flying up and back down again with obvious cables tied to her. Props kept falling and the camera crew appeared rattled and confused. It actually looked unsafe - like the cables could have broken leaving the star at the mercy of gravity.

Christopher Walken as Captain Hook walked through his performance injecting about as much personality as a wax museum sculpture and looked like he was reading every one of his lines off a teleprompter.

The low point came with a lackadaisically mimed sword fight between Pan and Hook near the end. The cast seemed tired at that point and beyond caring what the disaster looked like.

We watched this with great expectation of a good to great show. How could it not be great? Christopher Walken as Hook. A live production! Christian Borle from SMASH. Kellie O'Hara. I was even interested in Allison Williams.

But starting from the beginning it seemed as if it just didn't quite jell. "Peter Pan" didn't quite hit the mark when he shows up. Not bad. Just a bit too rushed or nervous sounding. The kids were fine, the mom and dad were fine.

Then we get to Neverland, and "Hook" shows up. Or maybe, just walks on as if exerting energy in the part would be to go against the director's expressed wishes.

I thought from the reviews that people were being unfair to Walken, but no, they were not unfair. Unfortunately, Walken pulled the whole show down. The pirates, for example, were campy and energetic and and clearly trying to have a good time. But Walken in the middle of them all? Scene after scene just sinks. It might be that he's tired, or that he doesn't care, or that he is just horribly miscast. Whatever the reason, he was completely wrong and spoiled the production. (Even the previews of the production show him as giving way less than 100% in rehearsal--which is disastrous for any production--a professional *must* be at 100% at *every* rehearsal and production.

Other people were fine. I wasn't overly impressed with the choreography, but it was fine. The sets weren't distracting--it's a representation of a live show, and so the sets are larger than life like they would be for a Broadway show.

I liked some of the new songs they inserted (one of them was from the 1954 production, if I understand correctly), and I thought the music was great--great production values.

All in all, given anyone else as "Hook," this would have been a good-to-great production. Give a fantastic "Hook," it would have been fantastic.

But with Walken, it was just a so-so production.

Five stars. Good enough to maybe watch again with your kids or grandkids, but not something you'd watch again on your own.

This shockingly awkward and careless production of a classic left me and my family (those who hadn't fled the room after Walken's Hookzombie appeared) numb with disbelief. How could a major studio disgorge so amateurish and unattractive a musical stew? No we weren't expecting performances like those of Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard from the golden age. We didn't demand that, but we did look forward to some higher grade fun than this dreck. Williams tries hard to lend a bit of charm to Peter and succeeds to some degree, but she's swimming against an ugly tide created by the director and production managers. Walken, with (almost literally) one eye on the teleprompter and the other on the studio clock (When can I get out of this nightmare and go strangle my agent?), delivers what has to be one of his strangest performances, mincing around among his equally directionless crew like a geezerly Jack Sparrow. The pacing is nonexistent. The colors and costumes frightening. The Neverland boys are aging chorusliners, and the "Redskins" are ...let's see...what exactly are they supposed to be?

Fell asleep twice last night watching this. Now, having spent several painful hours forcing myself to get through it all, I understand why I couldn't force myself to fight the sleep. Ms. Williams turns out to be an excellent singer, but she doesn't know what to do with her hands while she's singing and so keeps repeating the same motions over and over. It was so annoying. Walken is fine, perhaps a bit disappointing. Was this production meant to be seen by adults only? I have to wonder why it was shown on a school night and starting so late at 8 pm at that. Three hours is way too long for this. It was too long between songs and I saw no acting worth watching. I believe I was actually in pain, forcing myself to see it through to the end. One more complaint: why, on earth was the child, Wendy's, gown untied to show just a bit of pubescent cleavage? Remember her father saying she was almost grown-up? Why purposely present children this way? A disgrace for certain.

...but don't do it halfway in between. Peter Pan the musical has survived all sorts of "interpretations" over the years, starting back in the 1950s. Peter Pan has traditionally been played by a woman. It doesn't matter why since audiences apparently have accepted it. But if you're going to update the show, don't use a female. It doesn't work any more. And the rest of the young cast doesn't need to be too old any more either. There are plenty of wildly talented kids and teens who could have pulled this off. Then there is the music. The original score was a mish-mash of contributions by a variety of people (not an uncommon practice in those days), so adding songs to this version could have worked. It doesn't primarily because the added music, while coming from the same era, doesn't fit the original music's style. In the same way, the updated/added dialogue sounds out of place with the more traditional dialogue. Interesting casting/directing decisions: Young Allison Williams was acceptable as Peter, given the women-playing-boys tradition. After all, the beloved Mary Martin was already over 40 when she did it. Christopher Walken as Hook for some reason was playing the role as a cross between RuPaul and Fu Manchu - and a tired one at that. Since he began his career as a song-and-dance man on Broadway, this was strange choice. The very obviously "chorus boys" as the Lost Boys and the barely-clothed Indian braves, all doing a lot of what can only be described as prancing around, probably would have fit the 50s interpretation, but it looked very weird here. The pirates also had some very un-pirate-like dancing. Taylor Louderman sings beautifully, and she almost gets away with being Wendy, except that she is - ahem - rather well-developed. This makes her attraction to the obviously female Peter disconcerting. A younger Wendy can pull this off; it's just kind of skanky here. The use of a real dog as Nana robbed the show of Nana's lovely humorous and bittersweet moments. The narration was okay but seemed needlessly intrusive. The settings were very cartoonish. Again, this would have worked with a 50s interpretation; updated, they should have been more substantial. In short, the problems with Peter Pan Live! came with the original concept - or lack of one. Are you doing this as originally conceived, or are you doing it more modern? The producers never made up their minds, and it looks like it.