The Cathy Rigby “Peter Pan,” which flew into the Lunt-Fontanne at the beginning of December for a six-week run (it’s been touring the country for the better part of a year), is very much what you’d expect of a road-show revival that has as its star a world-class gymnast: it’s shopworn—if good, clean—fun. In view of Miss Rigby’s qualifications, the only surprising thing about the production is that the “flying” does not provide more spectacular element.
Until the curtain-call finale, when Miss Rigby soars out over the audience sprinkling “fairy dust,” she does pretty much what Mary Martin does in the broadcast version—now one of the best-selling children’s videos, along with the Disney animation. The aerial work, as always, is achieved through the agency of Flying by Foy—they handle most of the “Peter Pan”s that get produced professionally—and your program tells you that Peter Foy, who founded the company, manned the guy wires for Jerome Robbins in the original 1954 Broadway production of the Carolyn Leigh–Moose Charlap musical (which has additional lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and additional music by Jule Styne) and for the 1950 Jean Arthur–Boris Karloff version (that one had music by Leonard Bernstein), and that he apprenticed with Joseph Kirby, the technician who had flown Maude Adams in the 1912 and 1915 American revivals and had worked on the original London production in 1904.
As Miss Rigby swings back and forth across the stage, sometimes followed by Cindy Robinson, Chad Hutchison, and Britt West (as Wendy, Michael, and John), you get the firm impression that she is following in a long tradition, not carving one out. Even so, the emphasis in this production—directed by Fran Soeder—is more on musculature than on charm. There are no scrawny, neglected children here; nobody is ragged or underfed. The costumes that Mariann Verheyen has devised for the Lost Boys and Indian braves seem calculated to show off the maximum amount of “definition,” and even the ruffles on Wendy’s nightgown seem pumped.
I missed the Sandy Duncan revival of “Peter Pan” in 1979. But I saw the Mary Martin television version one or twice as a child, before it stopped being broadcast. Watching the show now, I was truck by how much this musical, like the turn-of-the-century play it’s based on, seems to reflect the anxiety of an emerging middle class about feeding its children. It’s about a new gentility, and uneasiness with the idea of having to work for a living. Much has been made of the infantilism of J.M. Barrie and the “cult of charm” he helped to foster. The last word on the subject probably belongs to Martin Green, who, referring to Disney’s attempts to vulgarize “Peter Pan” (particularly to sexualize Tinker Bell), commented that Barrie and Disney could “hold hands and simper at each other.” (Green called them “the two great seducers of English-speaking childhood.”) In America, where charm never took hold in quite the same that way it did in England, what has always made us willing to put up with this story (in the interests of cuteness and sentimentality, which are valuable commodities here) was the presence of the adult, female star.
Cathy Rigby sings flat in all the places where Mary Martin used to do her famous dip. She’s cute, in a clean-cut sort of way, taking up a Marquis of Queensberry stance, and she has a feel for broad comedy, but there’s something weirdly sexual about her presence: she actually seems like a boy. (Martin never did.) Mostly, though, what’s peculiar about the production—and Miss Rigby’s performance—is the absence of any sense of naughtiness or danger.
You can tell a lot about a Peter Pan by the conviction with which he presides over the “not me–not I” controversy. When Miss Rigby uncorrects everyone’s grammar in “I Won’t Grow Up,” you get the feeling that she is soft on this issue—that were you to make it worth her while, she would be willing to speak properly. But what matter? The children who attend this production of “Peter Pan” have the Mary Martin version at their fingertips—the record and the videocassette (it’s narrated, by the way, by Lynn Fontanne). They know how “Tender Shepherd” is supposed to sound and how Neverland is supposed to look. They know that Liza the housemaid is supposed to follow the children there, that she’s supposed to dance a little ballet (it’s cut in this production, along with “Mysterious Lady,” the siren song in which Mary Martin imitated the sound of a flute), and that it is she, not Michael Darling—the servant, not the master—whom Peter is supposed to teach how to crow.
So what difference does it make that the snow outside the window in the first scene looks like an invasion of fireflies, that there’s no real singing or dancing going on, or that Stephen Hanan, who isn’t Cyril Ritchard, doesn’t lace his picture of villainy with Restoration fop. What the kids in the audience probably take away with them isn’t James Leonard Joy’s garish Neverland scenery or the cartooniness of the Darling children but the set for an old-fashioned nursery (you can’t see that on television) and the memory of a top hat and a long, frilly nightgown waltzing around. Nor do they miss the point. The eight-year-old to whom I pointed out that Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are played by the same actor nodded, saying, “That’s how it always goes.”
Actually, “Love Diatribe,” Harry Kondoleon’s new play about a young man (Barry Sherman) who goes to his parents’ house for dinner and is so overcome by depression at what he finds there that he gradually becomes immobile, reminded me even more of the “Peter Pan” I grew up on, possibly because in “Love Diatribe” Martha Gehman gets us all clapping our hands to show we believe in “the healing power of love.” If you consider that Off Broadway is the place for truth (which Broadway tends to mistrust), then “Love Diatribe” is probably the perfect Off Broadway play: it’s just the right length and just the right breadth and has just the right degree of zaniness with something real at its core. It also has just the right amount of metaphorical content. (Mr. Kondoleon’s point is something about letting go of old grudges.) The play makes just enough references to real trouble to put the problems of its protagonists in perspective—and they’re references of just the right variety. In short, the play sends you out of the theatre feeling good but not smug, and that’s probably all I should say about it, because good off-Broadway plays are delicate things and should be left as found.
Jorge Cacherio, who directed, has assembled the perfect cast of perfect Off Broadway actors. They all give marvelously over-the-top performances—particularly Mr. Sherman, whose portrait of mute, debilitating ambivalence is so funny, and Michael Rispoli, whose plight as the only surviving child of a woman (Jane Cronin) determined to blame the neighbors for her other son’s AIDS-related death seems so sad. Miss Cronin moves gracefully back and forth between seeming real and seeming not real, which is what Kondoleon’s writing calls for, and Amy Aquino does a wonderfully laconic Eve Arden turn as Mr. Sherman’s acerbic sister. Edward Seamon, who plays the father, nearly cracked himself up the night I saw the play, and Lynn Cohen, who plays the mother, cracked me up many times, as did Miss Gehman, who comes frighteningly close to acting with her tongue in her cheek and unquestionably gets away with it.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 31, 1990