THEATRE REVIEW: PETER PAN
14 Jun'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 5 out of 5

STRATFORD — If, as Peter Pan playwright J.M. Barrie suggests, hand clapping is the best medicine for an ailing fairy, this town is about to become a major centre for the treatment of diseases afflicting those magic folk. It’s thanks to a delightful production of PETER PAN that opened on the stage of the Avon Theatre Saturday, serving to end the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s opening week on a high note.

Director Tim Carroll fuses an excellent cast and a superb design team into a presentation certain to delight audiences. Carroll’s production also serves as a reminder to a festival that of late has been obsessed with incorporating modern stage technology into the classics, that there’s still a lot of magic left in an old bag of tricks. As one actor recently observed, “Theatre has been doing 3D for centuries.”

In a production filled with theatrical magic, Carroll and his team use very little in the way of special effects that wouldn’t have been available in 1904 when PETER PAN, OR THE BOY WHO WOULDN'T GROW UP, first saw the title character lead his band of Lost Boys onto the London stage. In the title role, Michael Therriault returns to the festival after a personal triumph in the ill-fated theatrical production of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. His is a Peter capable of delighting patrons and breaking their hearts, constantly juggling boyish bravado and vulnerability.

The production gets off to a slow start, however, despite an impressive and crowd-pleasing turn by Jay T. Schramek as Nana, the canine nurse to the darling Darling brood — Wendy played by Sara Topham, John by Paul Dunn and Michael by Stacie Steadman. But once Therriault arrives, in company with his good friend Tinkerbell, in search of a magical shadow left behind in a previous visit, the story takes off — and never slows until it ends on a note both deliriously happy and touchingly melancholic. Under Peter’s tutelage, Wendy and her brothers are whisked away to a magical land inhabited by Peter’s gang of lost boys and a band of cutthroat pirates, led by the evil Captain Hook (Tom McCamus, putting the jolly in the Jolly Roger) and his henchman Smee (Sean Cullen).

There also is a strange band of Amazons who, in a weird bit of politically correct art imitating life, have elbowed aside the Indian tribe that originally occupied their space in Barrie’s tale. Of course, adventures ensue as Peter and the Lost Boys lead the Darling brood through a strange and wonder-filled landscape, populated by dinosaurs, mermaids, pirate ships, oversized birds and one humongous crocodile, all of it created by designer Carolyn M. Smith, with an assist from Leslie Frankish. All of these adventures play out under the watchful eye of creator Barrie, played by James Kirriemuir, who inhabits one small corner of the set and seemingly controls every twist and turn of the strange plot.

There are of course volumes that can and have been written about the subtext that drives the story of PETER PAN, but Carroll seems to have realized the thing that always endears Barrie’s youthful hero to his audience is charm.

Having realized it, he makes the most of it, for it is hard to imagine a production of Peter Pan filled with more charm.