Circus scene is the highlight of bland ‘Finding Neverland’
The best moment in “Neverland” — the meh musical about making “Peter Pan” that’s currently raining faux pixie dust on the Marcus Center — comes shortly before intermission, in an extended number called “Circus of Your Mind.”
“Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie (Will Ray) is facing his darkest hour. His producer (John Davidson) has lost faith in him. His fed-up wife (Janine DiVita) has left him for a Lord (Noah Plomgren). And he’s been banned from the home of the woman (Lael Van Keuren) and four boys he’s come to love.
Barrie whirls through a phantasmagoric underworld that captures the dark side of every circus, straddling that shadowy line between the magical and the tawdry. A world of play and a kingdom of despair. Neverland and Netherland.
Director Diane Paulus — a genius working with an ingenious creative team — combines striking choreography (Mia Michaels) and lighting (Kenneth Posner) to create an acid trip gone wrong. It’s all accompanied by the haunting and jangly music in Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy’s otherwise bland and ersatz score.
Here — and, regrettably, only here — what “Neverland” finds is a semblance of the nightmare within J.M. Barrie and his alternately dreamy and creepy story about channeling one’s inner child. But most of the time, this take-no-risks musical runs toward daylight, much like Peter without his shadow.
The problems begin at the top. Ray, a Kenosha native who only recently stepped into the role of Barrie, plays the way he sings: pleasantly. Always looking on the bright side of life, he gives us none of the broody melancholy that afflicted Barrie in real life and was conveyed by Johnny Depp in the 2004 film, from which this musical borrows heavily.
Nor is Ray alone in delivering relentlessly good cheer; the same goes for Van Keuren and her “American Idol” voice — big and brassy but without a hint of texture or feeling, of the sort you might expect from a woman who is dying.
The lovable munchkins — who, like the show’s dog, earned cheers less for what they did than who they embody — are similarly bathed in endless summer; that’s what happens when you’re stuck singing sticky lyrics like “you can be anything you wanna be/you can go anywhere you wanna see.” Despite a few pouts, even a bright-eyed Peter drowns in the treacly optimism.
The surrounding players are exaggerated, one-note caricatures; Barrie’s wife is a superficial shrew, her lover is a fop, the grandmother is stern and matronly, the promoter has a perpetual glint in his eye and the actors are campy.
Paulus and her designers are so good that one nevertheless gets an occasional glimpse of Neverland; the ending they deliver here is truly magical, technically and aesthetically.
But well before getting there, I was ready to walk Hook’s plank and abort a journey that finds little and risks less.
“Finding Neverland” continues through Sunday at the Marcus Center, 929 N. Water. For tickets, visit marcus center.org. Read more about this production at tapmilwaukee.com.