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.

I am surprised at all the negative reviews. This was live television. It is not supposed to be perfect. Many theater plays do not always go well and this is the same thing. It is precisely that spontaneity that comes with a live performance that makes it so much fun to watch. There is no post-production work when you do live, so that can't fix the occasional crew member or light that gets in the picture.

Most of the cast did a great job. If you know the history of Peter Pan productions, you would not be surprised at a young woman playing the title role. Allison Williams pulled it off beautifully, with a great singing voice and the guts to hook up to a wire on live TV.

As far as the stone-faced Christopher Walken, he played the role as he saw it. It worked, but it wasn't Dustin Hoffman or Cyril Ritchard. They saw it differently. It is called artistic license and Walken kept to his own style.

I gave it a 7 out of 10 because I thought the lost boys and the Indians were too old. They were extremely talented as dancers, actors and singers, but they looked almost perverse as they attempted to act like kids. Had they cast kids in those roles, the dancing and singing may have suffered, perhaps, but it would have looked better.

Some reviewers also complained about the sets. With very little CGI and only sparing use of green screen, the set designers did great! Neverland is a product of a child's imagination...it should be colorful.

I grew up watching Mary Martin play Peter Pan on our 9" black and white television. This was a modern tribute to that legendary performance. Watch the original again and you will see how archaic it looks. The performances are why it is a classic, and I hope time will show that this is no different.

Other than the too old ensemble to bring it down just a little, live television is something we need to see a lot more of.

...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.

I really wanted to like this. I thought that "The Sound of Music" was better than many said it was. This, however, doesn't work at all. Allison Williams is decent in the title role and there are a couple of troopers who make it work, but how Christopher Walken was chosen to play Captain Hook stretches the limits of credulity. He is terrible. He can't dance. He is a nervous wreck. And he can barely sing. Think of all the possibilities. For goodness sake, the put an embarrassed Christian Borle in the role of Smee. It must have killed him to do his usual classy job next to the stiff Walken (by the way I love Christopher Walken). It just never got off the ground. It begins with some decent stuff, but dies on the vine. There is no clean movement through the plot. It is jerky and endless. I wonder if this is the death knell for these productions. If the only reason to do this is the novelty, it may be time to stop. How about some high quality stage productions of some of the classic musicals, only recorded ahead of time.

After "The Sound of Music", I had high expectations for this production, since NBC seems to want to make this an annual event. While I didn't see as many excellent performances as last year, this was quite an accomplishment.

Taylor Louderman was the standout actor. Absolutely wonderful and a fine singer, plus she was beautiful.

Allison Williams was great as a singer and pretty good speaking lines, with occasional moments of brilliance. She was too pretty for me to consider her a boy, but at times I felt I was seeing Peter Pan rather than watching someone play a role and evaluating her. And she was completely convincing as British.

Christian Borle wasn't as spectacular as last year, but he did play two roles and did them very well. Without being told he had two roles, I would never have known. It was like Richard Bucket and his brother-in-law Onslow. Wait, not Richard. More like Hyacinth, but a male version.

Kelli O'Hara is an amazing singer.

The two young actors playing the Darling boys did a fine job for their age.

I liked the three pirates who spent the most time on screen other than Hook himself. I knew Shmee (that's how Hook pronounced it; live TV!) but I could never keep track of who the other ones were. But they were great and very funny. And not threatening at all. As dangerous as the pirates sounded in the Macy's parade and their first scene, they couldn't live up to their reputation and that's just fine. A kid-friendly movie can't have villains that are TOO scary. And these bumbling idiots reminded me of The Three Stooges or perhaps Dumb and Dumber (and Dumbest).

As for the pirates, they were very talented indeed as singers and dancers. Not since Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video have such sinister types shown so much musical talent. And no, I've never seen "West Side Story". Imagine, tap-dancing pirates. And pirates doing the tango. And waltzing! And an Esther Williams routine from overhead! What a silly yet magnificent production!

The Lost Boys were great too. Once again, I didn't really try to keep up with which one was which, but the three with the most lines all did a great job. Not just speaking lines but also singing and dancing.

Minnie Driver did a fine job as narrator and later as adult Wendy.

Finally, there is Christopher Walken. Sufficiently goofy, but I never once forgot this was Christopher Walken playing Hook. I don't know the man all that well but his distinctive style was there. Still, he was frequently overshadowed by his talented subordinates and he often didn't enunciate in a manner to stand out, or even be heard. He was entertaining enough, especially after I got used to (on a competing network on Sundays) seeing Pan as villain and Hook as handsome and dashing hero.

Tiger Lily wasn't given much to do. Alanna Saunders was pretty and a good dancer but she was kind of a disappointment.

In the "making of" special that aired a week earlier, I learned the people in charge of flying had a lot of experience with Peter Pan. They executed their jobs nearly flawlessly. Watching Pan fly was amazing. I couldn't see what held him (her) up except at the end. There may have been a slight problem with the youngest Darling because I could see an edit; apparently this wasn't completely live, because I saw the same thing happen 20 years ago in the sitcom "Roc". Ever since the Janet Jackson incident, "live" can't really be "live" because things can happen. Still, excellent work on the flying.

On the same special we were told how Tinkerbell would work. "She", of course, was presented spectacularly. And on this kid-friendly show, we were apparently lucky not to hear her talk. On that subject, the Macy's parade had one inappropriate word which I didn't hear here, and the worst thing we were told Tink said was a synonym for donkey. Yeah, that's it.

The well-known music, of course, was great. New songs were added, but this is real music and kids need to know that when I was their age, this is what music sounded like. Back then, rock and roll was this evil presence which mostly stayed in the shadows.

Once, again, NBC gave us something to be proud of, something the whole family could watch.