‘Peter and the Starcatcher,”
Rick Elice’s charming and inventive spin on the Peter Pan story, is still doing a brisk business at off-Broadway’s New World Stages.
It moved there after a successful run on Broadway, where it picked up five Tony Awards last year.
And it seems to have spawned a cottage industry of Peter Pan-themed shows hoping to make a run at New York.
Harvey Weinstein still hasn’t given up on “Finding Neverland,” his $10 million musical about “Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie.
The show opened to mixed reviews in Leicester, England, last fall, forcing the producer to back off his original plan to bring it to London this fall.
It’s now going into dry dock for a complete overhaul.
Captain Weinstein made one of his creators walk the plank — book writer Allan Knee, who wrote the play on which the musical is based. He’s been replaced by James Graham, who’s written at least a dozen plays, none of which anybody in New York has ever heard of.
But I’m told Weinstein was taken with Graham’s “This House,” which got very good reviews last year at the National Theatre.
It’s about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the House of Commons. What that’s got to do with pirates and Lost Boys beats me, but I hear from London sources the guy has talent.
Captain Weinstein has also changed directors, swapping out my good friend Rob Ashford for Diane Paulus, who just picked up the Tony for “Pippin.”
Ashford voluntarily abandoned ship, citing “scheduling conflicts.”
Captain Weinstein spared his songwriting team — Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, the talented guys behind “Grey Gardens” — but he’s forced them to take on a collaborator, Gary Barlow.
I’ve never heard of him, but apparently he’s popular in England as the lead singer of something called Take That.
After “Finding Neverland,” based on the fine Johnny
Depp movie, is refitted, it will open in the West End in the spring of 2014 and then, providing the crocodiles — that is, critics — don’t devour it, Broadway in 2015.
Another Peter Pan musical aiming for Broadway is “Fly,” which began previews this week at the Dallas Theater Center. This one is an adaptation of Barrie’s novel, “Peter Pan.”
(That Barrie estate is raking it in!)
Broadway’s keeping an eye on “Fly” because of its director, Jeffrey Seller, better known around town as a producer of such hits as “Rent,” “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights.”
Having made his pile, he now wants to be artistic.
Insiders are skeptical. “How many producers have become successful directors?” a skeptic asked. “One: Hal Prince.”
When I pointed out that producer Jed Harris successfully staged “The Heiress” in 1947, my skeptic snapped: “OK, two — in the last 100 years!”
“Fly” has a book by Rajiv Joseph, who wrote the vastly overrated “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which crashed and burned on Broadway, even with Robin Williams in it. The music is by Bill Sherman, who did the orchestrations to “In the Heights.” Joseph co-wrote the lyrics with Kirsten Childs, who wrote a show I love called “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin,” which ran at Playwrights Horizons several years ago.
One of my spies saw a workshop of “Fly” last month and was quite taken with it. You can check out excerpts on the Dallas Theater Web site, though they seem odd out of context.
One song, with the grating title “We Not Boys, We Lost Boys!,” looks like a cross between “Stomp” and “The Lion King.”
The other, called “We Are Pirates, Hear Us Roar,” seems like something out of Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes.”
We’ll reserve judgment until the reviews come out later this month.
In the meantime, you can still see the gold standard of Peter Pan shows — “Peter and the Starcatcher” — at New World Stages.