BEFORE: Johnny Depp carries over from last night's film, as does the U.K. setting. But I'm back on the subject of authors - a profession that got short shrift during my Labor Day chain, and which I touched on during Stephen King week - but there, they were all tortured psychos (Aren't they all, though? Really, aren't they?)
THE PLOT: The story of J.M. Barrie's friendship with a family that inspired him to create Peter Pan.
AFTER: This was a touching and endearing story about how "Peter Pan" (the original stage play, not the Disney-fied cartoon) was created. Of course, inspiration can come from unlikely sources, and in this case, it came from the author's playtime with the four young boys of the Davies family, who are recovering from the death of their father. It's a great symbiotic relationship, as the boys need cheering up, and the author has an imagination that needs a jump-start, and by play-acting as pirates, Indians, and lost castaways, he gains insight into the type of stories that kids enjoy.
By spending so much time with the four boys and their mother, Barrie puts a strain on his own marriage - his relationship with Mrs. Davies is portrayed as platonic, however, it supposedly sparked a lot of society gossip. Apparently there were also rumors that Barrie's interest in the young boys was also less than pure - so it's easy to draw a connection here to a certain recently deceased entertainer that also enjoyed spending time with young boys (and named his ranch after a location in "Peter Pan"...hmmm....)
This one hit home for me, particularly during the first performance of the finished play. When I was a young kid, my parents were very active in the Boston diocese, and performed a lot of charity work - so if we went to the circus or the Ice Capades, it was usually with a group of about 50 inner-city kids, and my dad would somehow get us to pop a huge amount of popcorn to bring for them - it was a little odd.
It was nice to see some of the backstage actions as the play was being rehearsed and staged - but the sequences where J.M. Barrie and the boys were pretending to be pirates had much better special effects - is that because no play (or movie) can measure up to the imagination of a child? And a little bit of "Jack Sparrow" seems to creep into Depp's performance during the pirate play-acting...
However, it's a little disappointing to find out that the filmmakers monkeyed with the timeline quite a bit, changing the dates of some very key events in the lives of these people, in order to create a more dramatic effect. Little facts, like the boys' father actually being alive at the time of the play's premiere...
Also. it would have been nice to see ALL of the play's inspirations - there must have been more. Who inspired the female characters, like Wendy? Is Peter Pan based on young Peter, or Barrie himself? And I happen to know that the same actor usually plays Mr. Darling and Captain Hook - was this due to an actor shortage, or is there something more Freudian going on? The play is so rich, it must have drawn from more sources, that's all I'm saying.
For another play about a boy who never grew up, I recommend the Pee-Wee Herman Show, now playing on Broadway. While the plot is very similar to the old L.A. stage show (that he put on before getting into children's TV) there are some updates (the Playhouse gets wired for internet) but a lot of the original cast returned - Miss Yvonne, Jambi and Mailman Mike. Cowboy Curtis was re-cast, of course, and Captain Carl is sorely missed - but it was still a hilarious night out for me last week.
Also starring Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Last Chance Harvey" - but didn't he also play Capt. Hook once?), Freddie Highmore, Julie Christie (last seen in "Heaven Can Wait"), Radha Mitchell, and Ian Hart (last seen in "Enemy of the State") as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
RATING: 7 out of 10 Indian headresses
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