In a week when flying off to Neverland held some appeal but lovely thoughts were hard to come by, NBC, at long last, aired “Peter Pan Live!,” a three-hour performance, months in the hyping, that combined the brilliance of the 1954 musical with the spectacle of Allison Williams and Christopher Walken in Pan and Hook drag, experimenting with British accents, swordfighting, and fairy dust. In New York City and across the country, thousands of protestors filled city streets in the wake of the Ferguson and Staten Island grand-jury decisions; in living rooms, millions of televisions tuned in to the goings on at Grumman Studios, in Bethpage, Long Island, and a night of family-friendly Walmart commercials. Just as, last week, you could watch the broadcast of the Thanksgiving Day parade unaware of the protests a few feet away, you could watch “Peter Pan Live!” unaware that a near-revolution was taking place. Twitter became a weird congeries of protest updates and jokes about Smee.
J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”—a grand dream of childhood, escape, flying, adventure, exoticism, and the comforts of good parenting—was a play first, in 1904, and then a book, and then a 1954 Jerome Robbins musical, which combined some of the greatest talents of midcentury theatre. The terrific songs, by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh, and by Jule Styne with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, are melodically and lyrically sophisticated, a kind of Cole Porter for children. The show, long-running onstage and on TV broadcasts, led by the dynamo Mary Martin as Peter and the brilliant Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook, respected children enough to indulge their fantasies—flying, freedom, independence—and to mightily goof around. It was pure fun, with a gorgeous, clever score. Hook was a menace, but a silly one, coming up with evil schemes to the beat of a tango or a tarantella, and making wistful remarks like “Fame, thou glittering bauble!” Whatever J. M. Barrie was up to (best not to dwell on it), the musical is largely about the fantasy of adventure within the assurance of safety. “Tender Shepherd,” the comforting lullaby whose gentle canon singing suggests the stability of days turning into nights and family members being nearby every morning, and “Neverland,” about a mystery realm “where dreams are born and time is never planned,” are equally beautiful.
For NBC, “Peter Pan Live!” itself offered the promise of adventure within safety. (As Mr. Darling, played by Christian Borle, said to his children, “When you live in a world of financial pressures, you can’t live in a world of make-believe.”) Last year, NBC broadcast of “The Sound of Music Live!,” entering a climate of a viewership primed by “American Idol,” “Glee,” and so on, had more than twenty million viewers. “Peter Pan” held a similar appeal, and without swastikas. Months ago, NBC announced the casting of Allison Williams, of HBO’s “Girls” (and the daughter of the network’s nightly-news anchor, Brian Williams) as Peter Pan and of Christopher Walken as Captain Hook, and ever since we’ve been haunted by the image, seemingly everywhere, of a short-haired Williams, in a green vest and a mesh T-shirt, staring earnestly into a candy-colored beyond while perched on the rigging of a pirate ship. Its promotion all over NBC, on “The Tonight Show” and elsewhere, made “Peter Pan Live!” seem like all-in-the-NBC-family fun, but what Williams brought to it wasn’t fun in the traditional sense of the word. Where Mary Martin had the pixieish quality of a young mom or teacher cheerfully engaging in playtime—her Peter embodied a kid’s attitude (“I don’t wanna wear a tie!”), wielded a strange authority ("Lovelier thoughts, Michael!"), and was the ultimate bad influence—Williams had the grave air of a woman who would boldly wear a somewhat mannish haircut to achieve a childhood dream. She seemed to be daring you to watch her perform. There was nothing playful about it. She had taken over that pirate ship, and now it was hers.
On the broadcast, Williams had a similar quality. When she first flew into the Darling children’s bedroom window, after we’d experienced the charms of the opening music and “Tender Shepherd,” an element of anxiety flew in as well, and not just because of the tedious business about Tinkerbell and the shadow. When Williams looked out the Darlings’ bay window, trying to talk in a British accent, she wasn’t so much an excited little kid as a professional under a zillion-dollar spotlight. When she sang “I Gotta Crow,” she chopped the air with determination on the line “If I’m pleased with myself I have every good reason to be!” When she sang “I’m Flying,” she smiled with real warmth at the boys who she taught to fly, but you were so conscious of her pride in hitting all the right notes, swooping through the air, that the only real levity came from the melody itself and from the sight of the younger Darling boy, Michael (John Allyn), kicking his tiny legs with wild glee, or perhaps panic, as he flew through the air. Then they all flew out the window, off to Neverland. Phew.
Until last night, we’d mostly heard Williams sing on “Girls” and, before that, in her YouTube video “Mad Men Theme Song … with a Twist,” in which she sings “Nature Boy,” the Nat King Cole single, over a jazz orchestra playing the “Mad Men” theme, while wearing a gown and elbow-length gloves. She has a fine voice, and confidence that can either charm or exhaust you: she makes little gestures with her hands, she looks challengingly at the camera, she smiles proudly. She feels a bit like that friend or relative who always wants to sing, and you’re always a little worried about it—not because of the voice but because of the intensity. This quality of Williams’s has been used to damn Marnie, on “Girls,” not once but over and over. Marnie sings when she shouldn’t: at parties, to an ex in front of his co-workers, in a cringe-inducing video cover of “What I Am,” which her friends watch and ridicule behind her back, à la David Brent and “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” On “Girls,” Williams is in on the joke, but her real singing, while less threatening, lacks lightness. So does her acting. When she said to the Lost Boys, “Boys, Wendy is used to a home that is very orderly, neat, and tidy,” you felt her sap rise—this, she cared about. When Tiger Lily exclaimed, “Peter Pan is the sun and the moon and the stars!” Peter said, “Yes, I know,” with an almost annoyed nod of her head, like, Why are you wasting my time?
Enter Christopher Walken. Captain Hook, historically, is a florid schemer who talks like Oscar Wilde and combines the Machiavellian glee of Snidely Whiplash with the outfit of Captain Morgan. Walken, all steely-eyed mock-seriousness, with a slightly drugged-out air of unpredictability, had presence but lacked Cyril Ritchard’s gusto. It was less believable that Walken’s Hook would come up with a plan, to a tango rhythm, to cook a cake, quite large, and fill each layer in between with icing mixed with poison. Ritchard’s Hook was a sort of scheming duke, proud of his villainy (“Who’s the swiniest swine in the world?” he sings happily, during his theme song) and he played Mr. Darling as well, which made all of male British authority seem a bit suspect. Walken played only Hook, and was his usual deadpan, way-out self. “Who is Bluebeard?” he asks his pirates, putting the emphasis on “beard.” “Nobody!” they say. Right—nobody says Blue_beard_. Where Ritchard’s gloating was deliciously proud, Walken seemed to be singing about an evil friend he used to know. In a making-of clip posted online, Walken said, “Hook doesn’t have to be a real guy. He can be an actor. I hope Hook is just like me.” He was him, all right.
Over all, “Peter Pan Live!” was exactly what you’d expect: big names, big budget, big sets colored like a Pixar movie, “Ugg-a-Wugg” successfully rejiggered with the help of a Native American consultant, Americans unable to pretend to be British, brilliant songs a bit lost in the dampness of a three-hour production and swooping camerawork and a hangar of elaborate sets. In some ways the show was predictable, and in some ways it was as disorienting as the contemporary world itself. Rather than watching actors fly from a fixed point, we seemed to be everywhere at once, as if chasing them or hopping around. The accents were ever-changing. You weren’t sure what gender, age, or nationality Peter Pan was supposed to be, or what, exactly, he was up to. The Lost Boys, who refused to grow up, had grown up—the median age looked to be about eighteen—and dressed like members of a prep-school rugby team. Meanwhile, there was no escaping to a fantasy land; reality was more compelling. At a climactic moment on the pirate ship, reports on Twitter showed that protestors had shut down everything from Grand Central to a highway in Dallas. Onscreen, Walken, as Captain Hook, joylessly threw Michael Darling’s Teddy bear into the ocean.
