Marc Glazer
American Players Theatre veteran Marcus Truschinski (center) plays Captain Hook.
Peter Pan’s Neverland is also the Alwaysland of childhood. Surely we all remember the magic of Tinker Bell and pixie dust, the pirates and the island populated by a scrappy band of girls.
Actually, that last part is new. Children’s Theater of Madison features them in the upcoming production of Peter Pan, running March 14-22 in Overture’s Capitol Theater.
It’s still the same musical comedy that premiered on Broadway in 1954. It’s just that girls replace Neverland’s Indian tribe.
“They’re a group of strong independent females,” says Roseann Sheridan, the company’s artistic director. “They’re sort of longing for a female figure to provide some basic care, and tender loving care.”
There still is a princess named Tiger Lily, but she is no longer a member of the “Pickaninny” tribe, and they no longer speak gibberish.
Peter and company had a long gestation. Scottish novelist J.M. Barrie introduced the characters in 1902, as part of a longer, more serious book. He revisited them several times, adding material. The first play opened in 1904, in London. The first movie adaptation came in 1924. The Disney feature film arrived in 1953, a year before Mary Martin flew the title role on Broadway.
The version Madison will see was created by Minneapolis’ Children’s Theater Company in 2015.
“It’s one of the premier companies in the country for young audiences,” says Sheridan. “They worked together with the people who hold the rights to the original material.”
The result, says Sheridan, “retains all the integrity of the story, and the principal characters and the music, but it addresses a very offensive, very stereotypical version of Native Americans.”
This is a not uncommon problem. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The ballet’s original Arabian and Chinese dances said a lot more about the views of Imperial Russia in 1892 than they did about the cultures they were supposed to represent.
The Nutcracker dances have long since been toned down, but what to do about Barrie’s stereotypes? The key was to look at their reason for existence — their dramatic purpose.
“I think the original idea was that there were a group of people who were part of the island that were foreign, and were not familiar to colonialists or to those from British society,” says Sheridan. “They were, I would say, protectors of the island,” says Sheridan. “So instead of them being portrayed as stereotypical Native Americans, we have reconceived them as a strong group of girls who are native to the island or have come there like the [Lost] Boys have come, by accident.”
And they bring a bit of a message, too. “The girls have a way of escaping the constraints of Victorian society,” she says. “You don’t get any of that story through the text in the play, but hopefully we’re capturing, in the look and the feel, the way that these girls work together.”
Marcus Truschinski, a veteran of American Players Theatre, will play Captain Hook. Peter Pan will be played by 16-year-old Laetitia Hollard, of McFarland. Young Wendy will be played by Maddie Uphoff, a sophomore at West High School and the stepdaughter of Broadway star Karen Olivo.
