NEW YORK — Even without Neil Patrick Harris — a guest-star turn massively juicing up ticket sales for a few weeks — “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” will be a great night out for a family audience. The politically incorrect show is a total blast and one of the very few Broadway attractions where kids are encouraged to clap, boo and talk back to the annoying actors. One lucky pint-size theatergoer from the Bronx sitting near me last Sunday afternoon even got the chance to do a magic trick with Harris: he was so demonstrably thrilled, the smiles on his parents’ face illuminated half his row.
But this isn’t a kid’s show, per se. It’s a good date-night choice too, given its capacity to talk to both sides of the great political divide, to make your forget the troubles of the week and to actually enjoy the rapidly vanishing art of physical comedy: prat falls, head slaps, collapsing props, the whole kit and caboodle of comedic pleasures.
“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is far better than the last Broadway show, “The Play That Goes Wrong,” from the British troupe that calls itself the Mischief Theatre. This writing team and performing crew, made up of Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields, has hit upon a great gimmick: set up a show-within-a-show situation where a theatrical endeavor by a fictional college amateur dramatic society is doing a show in all seriousness, only for everything to go wrong. That means doors stick, actors get stuck in scenery, sound cues go awry, embarrassing stuff is heard over headsets and, in totem, audiences get to watch the gentle art of perseverance through trying circumstances, a staple of farce since Roman times.
But whereas “The Play That Goes Wrong” was based on just a generic kind of play, “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has real source material, helpfully in the public domain, that the audience already knows. That gives the show more structure than was the case last time around: the troupe gets to spoof all those bad prior productions of “Peter Pan,” as previously experienced, if only in grade school, by almost everyone in the building. And it becomes possible to lampoon stuff associated with British panto, much of which had vaudeville roots.
But there’s something else at play: “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” also is big enough to actually feel like a Broadway show with the attendant ticket prices, which was not true last time. You get a star making a cameo (Harris is presumably soon to be followed by suitable storytelling replacements), a revolving stage (that goes wrong), musical numbers (Cathy Rigby need not worry), even black-light puppets (the hooded puppeteers crash into each other with painful results). Admirably, the show has retained a palpable handmade artifice, but it’s also a genuine physical spectacle, as designed by Simon Scullion.
Kids love to be told they are not safe, not least because so much of the sentimental, moralistic pap thrown their way insists otherwise. When someone is not talking down to them but screaming at them in rage, they almost faint from their sheer delight of getting to have a fresh conversation. This embrace of the danger of life is the secret sauce of “Harry Potter” in all of its brand extensions, and the Mischief crew clearly have learned that the more their faces go red in annoyance at the shouts of their younger fans, the more they are enjoyed. And, of course, this happily also applies to adults.
The center hook (I’m here all week) of the show is Shields, playing the director and leading actor. (The show uses much the same cast as “The Play That Goes Wrong.”) Anyone familiar with the classic sitcom “Fawlty Towers” can’t miss the homage to John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, but whatever Shields might lack in originality, he makes up for in the force of his fake pomposity.
In essence, he treats his audience much like the obsequious Fawlty treated the guests in his hotel: important people not to be told the truth in any circumstances, whatever disasters are happening behind the scenes. It’s a classic farcical setup, and it works deliciously here.
Add in Lewis as a classic sidekick playing the nursery dog, among others; Nancy Zamit as a less-than-graceful Tinker Bell; Chris Leask as the backstage malcontent, and Jonathan Sayer as a hapless cast member who needs to have his lines fed to him through radio-frequency headphones and, well, you have all the comic types.
But these shows also need skilled normative character to root the audience, though, and, aptly enough, that Connie Booth-like role is played by Bianca Horn, who essays both Wendy and, of course, the actress playing Wendy.
Farce is rarely taken seriously on Broadway, of course, but this one deserves to be. It’s very much in “One Man, Two Guvnors” territory, a madcap couple of hours that bespeaks of old-school pleasures and fun for all.
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At the Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York; pangoeswrongbway.com.
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