Show: 1
Title: The Peter Pan Cometh
Category: Comedy / Mystery / Literary adaptation
By: Clevername Theatre
Written by: Alexander Gerchak
Location: Theatre in the Round
Summary: A mash-up of the classic children's story Peter Pan by J.M Barrie with Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh.
Highlights: For the third year in a row, Clevername brings us a mashup of a sweet children's tale with a dark classic play. In 2022 it was Winnie the Pooh and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 2023 was The Care Bears with Mother Courage and her CHildren, and this year we have perhaps their most clever pairing yet: Peter Pan and The Iceman Cometh. I'm of course very familiar with the former, but not at all with the latter. A quick WIki read tells me it's a bleak existential tale of alcoholics who await visits by a salesman, who tells them they should all quit drinking, oh and by the way he killed his wife. Somehow, the story of a boy who refuses to grow up (inspired by Barrie's brother who died as a child) meshes brilliantly with this existential story of dying dreams. And as with their previous productions, it works because the cast is 100% committed to it, performing as if they're in a serious drama despite playing iconic children's characters high on pixie dust. Hook (Thomas Buan), Smee (Alec Berchem), and Tinkerbell (Isabelle Hopewell) are wallowing in a cove when Peter Pan (Nick Hill) appears in a suit, boater hat, and roll-y shoes, announcing that he's all grown up and they should all give up the dust and join him in London. But then the truth comes out about his life, and Wendy, and it's not happy. But it is very clever, smart, ridiculous, and well executed, with whimsical live glockenspiel music (played by Bradley Kallhoff), spot on character costumes, and some kind of blue sugary powder as the dust.