I didn’t believe them. Those who
told me how awful Finding Neverland really was, were, I thought, somewhat (if only
somewhat) venting over principal producer Harvey
Weinstein’s
reputed hiring, firing and mistreatment of a fairly well-regarded
creative team and starting over with a new director and writers with no
musical theatre cred at all, only to at last wind up delivering a
show without a sense of having been bred so much as ejaculated—ahem, by
which I mean explosively ejected. Behave yourselves.
Well,
I didn’t see for myself at first. My voter invitation never arrived, I then got
involved in my own show up Canada-way, five or so months passed, in which the
voting period ended; and it was only until I returned from Montreal to finally
settle back into New York that I thought to pursue seeing the show anew, just
to review it, and graciously, I was allowed to attend.
From
minute one, it was clear that not only were the reports right; they were
conservative. And I was flabbergasted. Finding Neverland was even worse than I might have imagined.
But
here’s the factor that simply cannot be
ignored.
It
absolutely, unequivocally has its audience.
And
it satisfies them.
And
such an audience was in force—and, so far as I could tell, in harmonious
approval—the night I attended.
When
a musical belongs to a certain renegade class, like the classic sung-through
Euro-musical (before the vocabulary became self-parodistic), or Spring
Awakening, or Hamilton, that manage to touch upon something in the zeitgeist,
some confluence of culture, currency and style that’s ready to be ignited,
there’s usually a way to get at why it hits, irrespective of whether or not a
given critic may like it or not;
there’s something quantifiable that can be parsed in a large, meaningful
context. But when the show is so tawdry of delivery as to be unqualified for
that criteria, landing in some gray area between mild replication of renegade
tropes and craft-loose traditionalism…then it becomes harder to explain. All I
can give you is a best guess.
We’ll
start with this. When I say “it hits,” I’m not saying that Finding Neverland
is near hit status (i.e. making its money
back). Its current marketing strategy includes deep ticket discounts—but
that strategy is making it affordable to the audience that wants it. Plus its
cast album was recorded late and was released only recently; yet another effort
to keep it alive—but albums aren’t cheap to record; it’s a tool for the
current run and the future; a London production has been announced. The
producers are supporting it and it’s holding steady. But in the current
climate, holding steady is a thing.
I’ve
not yet seen the hit film upon which the musical is based (screenplay by David
Magee), so I don’t know how bookwriter James
Graham’s adaptation differs (I do know
that the fellow who wrote the source play, Alan Knee, was fired as librettist during the musicals trials
and tribulations), but the film’s boilerplate synopsis matches that of the
musical, which follows: [the story] follows playwright J.M. Barrie (Matthew
Morrison) as he summons the courage to
become the writer—and the man—he yearns to be. Barrie finds the
inspiration he’s been missing when he meets the beautiful widow Sylvia (Laura
Michelle Kelly) and her four young sons:
Jack, George, Michael and Peter. Delighted by the boys’ hilarious escapades,
Barrie conjures the magical world of Neverland and writes a play unlike any the
high-society London theatergoers have ever seen [Peter Pan]. It’s
a tremendous risk [as personified by an older character actor—Kelsey
Grammar when the show opened, currently Anthony
Warlow, very soon Terrence Mann—who plays both Barrie’s badgering-doubtful
producer and the badgering-challenging Captain Hook in Barrie’s mind] but as
Barrie himself comes to discover, when you believe, you can fly.”
Or
something.
Anyway,
it’s a story that happens mostly internally, it’s not really about anything but
an author finding his muse, there are no antagonists to speak of, just a little
angsty-authory soul-searching (during which Barrie and his society wife [Teal
Wicks] realize they’re not quite made for
each other, so there’s that, along with widow Sylvia’s grande dame mother [Carolee
Carmello] who—well I’m not sure what
she does for a living, story-wise, but I’ll allow that it means to
be something)—but all the Peter
Pan trappings are illustrative and somehow
that seems to take the place of an actual plot.
So,
after all this preamble. Why is this, dare I say it, objectively terrible show
hanging on?
Because
somehow, on some level—and this is one of those freak-of-nature alchemy
things, I don’t believe it can ever be replicated—Harvey Weinstein, in
deciding to
eschew artistic nuance for his notion of the broad populism he believes
is the key to making this heady material accessible to the hoi poloi,
ordered one from
column A and one from column B, off the smudgy menu of Stuff That I've
Seen Work Before; and at that the a la carte menu, not the whole dinner
with extra context.
Overblown, muggy acting (that director Diane Paulus is complicit in this is kind of surprising), kid
actors exhibiting not a shred of natural behavior when “the cutes” or
“indicationitis” will serve; a libretto so slender it just about provides
context for the songs; and an anachronistic pop-rock, slightly techno score by
un-theatred recording artists (familiar music and bland
lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot
Kennedy). And just enough Peter Pan indicia
for the connection between Barrie and his creation to earn its keep. Basically
a shake ‘n’ bake of ingredients that have proven commercially
successful at certain previous times and not necessarily together. And lo, boom, Finding Neverland is this perfect/imperfect package of what audiences looking
to Lez Miz and Phantom as models of form—or anyway,
of expectation—want more of, perfunctorily conflated with traditional
spoken-scene-into-song build. And who’s to say Weinstein was wrong?
In
terms of getting exactly what he wanted, not I.
All
I can say is, if the state of musical theatre art is something about which
you’re passionate, and yet you feel you must see everything of consequence, as
I do, walk, don’t run, to the theatre. Walk, I repeat. Walk slowly. You won’t
outlast Finding Neverland's tenure at the Lunt Fontanne; but you can try…
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