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.
