Ready for flight
It’s been a bumpy trip to the stage for ‘Finding Neverland,’ as Harvey Weinstein takes a gamble with a Broadway debut
NEW YORK — A week from opening night, what might charitably be called a charge of creative tension ripples through a rehearsal for the new Broadway musical “Finding Neverland.”
The show’s choreographer is jumping on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre to switch up the pacing of a fantasy sequence. Kelsey Grammer is standing stage right, working on a joke about cucumber sandwiches.
His costar, “Glee’s” Matthew Morrison, is mentally running through a number that has been overhauled so many times the musical veteran has taped a crib sheet on a strategic spot inside the orchestra pit so he can keep the lyrics straight.
“Can you get your crocodile tail on?” a voice projects from the middle of the theater. It belongs to Diane Paulus, the Tony-winning director on whose back this long-scrutinized, much-fiddled-with show is riding. “Wear it lower, so it’s not at your waist,” she added, this time addressing an ensemble cast member. “Then you can get to the lamp post in time.”
As “Finding Neverland” prepares to open Wednesday after a gestation period of nearly five years and a budget of at least $20 million, the theater world finds itself with an unusually big bet. Adapted from the 2004 Londonset film about playwright J.M. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp), a widow and her sons, “Finding Neverland” marks Harvey Weinstein’s Broadway debut as a creative producer — and raises the question of whether the brassy film executive who has turned more than a few magic tricks in Hollywood can repeat those feats on Broadway.
That, however, is only one of many points of intrigue for the show. The story of the struggles of author Barrie (Morrison) to create “Peter Pan”
in the early 1900s has faced as many challenges as its lead character.
“Finding Neverland” is based on a well-liked but hardly iconic movie about Peter Pan, has few scenes of the flying hero and seeks to maintain the film’s whiff of tragedy while laying on plenty of pop songs.
The show’s music was composed by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy — the Brits best known for the chart-topping boy-band Take That (best known in the U.S. for their 1995 singalong, “Back for Good”).
Says Weinstein bluntly, “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The screen-to-stage trend has gone into overdrive in recent years, reaching far beyond Disney Theatricals shows (“The Lion King,” “Aladdin”) to such less obvious source material as “Rocky,” “Once” and the upcoming “Waitress.”
That craze has sent many an enterprising producer to his library and prompted the opportunity-minded Weinstein to embrace “Neverland” as a stage piece. After all, the film embodied Weinstein productions of that era, which also included “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chocolat” — light comedies in foreign settings that proved surprisingly popular. It seemed just the right genteel fit for modern Broadway.
Matters hardly proved that simple.
A 2010 U.K. tryout with Tony-winning director and choreographer Rob Ashford was panned by critics. The show tried too hard to emulate the film, Weinstein believes — forcing a ground-up reconstruction when the project reached the United States. Paulus mounted the show at her American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where it was better-received than Ashford’s U.K. edition but still continued to evolve.
The production’s arrival in New York wasn’t the end of the road, either. In recent weeks, “Neverland” has undergone eleventh-hour adjustments that are large even by the standards of new musicals.
“It’s been a challenge,” Grammer says before a recent preview performance. “‘Rigorous,’ I think, would be the word.”
On the rehearsal day, the company is working out the kinks of “All of London Is Here Tonight,” written just a few days before — nearly halfway through previews — but is now the anchor of the show’s troubled opening.
The addition of “All of London” illustrates the challenge of adapting films for the stage.
Many movies, especially period dramas, start off slowly with necessary exposition. But musicals tend to require a big number to set the tone.
“You can’t just try to recreate what happened on film,” Paulus says. “It won’t work. The opening just felt too stuffy,” she added of the earlier attempts.
Paulus in recent years has directed well-regarded stagings of “Hair” and “Pippin,” among others. She says, with a hopeful note in her voice, that she didn’t believe all the down-to-the-wire work spelled trouble.
“Andrew Lloyd Webber was backstage the other night, and he told a story about how ‘Oklahoma!’ had a different name right before it opened,” she says. “You take comfort in all the war stories of opening numbers that went into hit new musicals at the last minute.”
Rather than have Barlow and Kennedy write songs off the script — a typical approach — Paulus and Weinstein sent them off to compose music independently. That may explain why many of the numbers sound as much like radio-friendly pop numbers as standards.
“I needed to be honest; I’m not someone who writes musicals. I’d never done it before,” Barlow says. “So I just said, ‘Let me have the experience of sitting down at a piano and seeing what moves me.’ ” That process went on for a year, at which point Barlow and Kennedy delivered 19 songs to Paulus.
For all of “Neverland’s” pop gloss, it also contains a melancholy vibe, as the widow, Sylvia (played by Laura Michelle Kelly), suffers a series of tragedies. “There’s a lot of uplift but also something sad and emotional, which I think makes this unique,” Kelly said.
There is some fun too. Grammer stars as the putupon American producer who has to see Barrie’s unconventional Peter Pan through, allowing for Grammer’s brand of Noel Cowardesque comedy. There is even a “Cheers” joke.
It’s easy to find in “Neverland” parallels to Weinstein’s film career, at least in terms of process — a seeking out of top talent, a lot of tweaking, plenty of pre-opening drama and even a version of what Weinstein describes as screen testing, via Broadway audience surveys.
Can it work? The preview-performance box office has been strong, and at a recent performance, the crowd’s response was enthusiastic. There may be an echo of Weinstein’s film oeuvre, which over the years has seen a correlation between pre-opening tension and post-release success.
“He’s not what we used to call in TV an early settler,” Grammer says. “He won’t go for the joke or line just because it works right away.”
Paulus says Weinstein ultimately realized he had more to gain by listening, even reading books on theater she recommended and allowing her to win many of the creative battles.
Weinstein admits the challenge has been to relinquish control in areas he’s unfamiliar with.
“The temptation is to replicate the movie on the stage,” he says. “But there are a lot of mistakes that can come that way. As I found out, because I was the author of those mistakes.”
He says he didn’t have a burning desire to do another Broadway show.
“I just had to get this out of my system.”
Just the same, he’s contemplating other experiments, including a stage version of “Around the World in 80 Days,” the Jules Verne novel that has yielded several movies. Weinstein sees it as a musical, and he hopes that both Paulus and Barlow will be along for the ride.