“As a child, the director Christopher Alden was obsessed with the musical ‘Peter Pan,’” writes Elizabeth Vincentelli in Tuesday’s (6/26) New York Times. “Now, decades later, he gets to direct ‘Peter Pan.’ Well, the other one. The show Mr. Alden is staging as part of the Bard SummerScape festival at Bard College, starting on Thursday and running through July 22, is not the Mary Martin blockbuster of his youth but an earlier adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play with a wonderful, undeservedly obscure score by Leonard Bernstein, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. That production—which starred the unlikely combo of Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff as Captain Hook—closed in 1951 after a respectable 321 performances, but then essentially disappeared. The pared-down Bard revival, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., appears to be the first New York presentation in 68 years…. The score evokes influences as diverse as Gilbert and Sullivan and Kurt Weill, and is often suffused with an evocative, melodic wistfulness.” Said Christopher Alden, “I think the story really moved him on a very personal level. The childlike innocence, the naïveté he brought to this music are somewhat unique in his oeuvre.”
Posted June 28, 2018
