Peter and the Starcatcher has sailed its way into the Shaw Festival like a gust of fresh sea air

Share

What's not to love about Peter and the Starcatcher?

This pirate-filled prequel to Peter Pan was a surprise success in a back-to-basics production on Broadway – and it's now sailed its way to the Shaw Festival, arriving in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., like a revivifying gust of fresh sea air.

Artistic director Jackie Maxwell captains a cast of a dozen actors comprised of festival veterans letting their hair down, and younger ensemble members rising to the challenge of telling a complex story with little more than the proverbial two planks and a passion.

Adapted from Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's young adult novel by Jersey Boys' Rick Elice, Peter and the Starcatcher takes place in a pair of acts – one by sea, the second by land.

Feisty young British lass Molly (the increasingly indispensable Kate Besworth) and her nanny Mrs. Bumbrake (Jenny L. Wright) board a ship called the Neverland, off to the kingdom of Rundoon with a cargo of orphan boys being sold into slavery. One orphan (Charlie Gallant) has no name but a suspicious amount of stage time, so it's easy to guess who he will eventually not grow up into.

Meanwhile, Molly's father Lord Aster (a goofily gallant Patrick Galligan) is on-board a faster ship called the Wasp, also headed to Rundoon with a secret substance called "starstuff" in the hold. Along the way, however, his ship is hijacked by an oddly familiar pirate named Black Stache (Martin Happer) with a small sidekick named Smee (the talented Jonathan Tan).

Black Stache quickly discovers that the Neverland's nasty captain Bill Slank (a scary Graeme Somerville!) has switched the ships' cargoes. Cue an epic sea battle – conjured by the cast using only a few props, some ropes and swaths of blue fabric. (In an underwater scene, Wright demonstrates a hitherto hidden acrobatic talent for aerial silks.)

The Shaw Festival has explored the dramatic worlds of Peter Pan's playwright J.M. Barrie in more depth than any other theatre in North America – producing not just his most famous work, but The Admirable Crichton and a number of his short plays (including, later this season, The Twelve-Pound Look). It certainly makes sense for Peter and the Starcatcher to play here then, on one level.

And yet, physical theatre – or what's referred to in the program notes as "story theatre" or "poor theatre" – is usually not in the festival's wheelhouse. Such theatre is the specialty of, indeed, poorer Canadian companies like Theatre Smith-Gilmour that have long toiled on the margins of the classical festival juggernauts.

But Maxwell and movement director Valerie Moore organized a workshop in the winter outside of regular rehearsals to help this cast devise a physical language to tell this story – and the result is an ensemble that feels refreshingly non-hierarchical for once.

A sequence where Molly explores the Neverland's hold, peering into room after room, is an imaginative highlight, as actors transform from inanimate objects into squabbling sailors and back again in a split second. (Kevin Lamotte's lighting certainly helps shape the mostly empty space – given a nautical feel by designer Judith Bowden.)

If there's a role designed to stick out in the show, it's Black Stache – whose future identity in the Peter Pan story is also easy to surmise. Happer is provided with plenty of opportunity for overboard pantomime-villain excess, but he stays remarkably restrained. Here is the rare actor who can give more when it's needed, but still knows when a little is a lot. When Happer does deign to steal a scene – when Black Stache undergoes an expected amputation – it's a real riot.

I don't want to give away too much more about Peter and the Starcatcher's plot, but it is full of fun in-jokes so young audience members (the Shaw suggests ages eight and up) might want to be brush up on Barrie's mermaids, ticking crocodiles and pirate prosthetics to enjoy the evening fully.

Perhaps Peter and the Starcatcher's success at the Shaw – which I think is inevitable – might lead the festival to introduce similar prerehearsal workshops for productions of mandate plays next. (A spare, physical Saint Joan by a company named Bedlam off-Broadway was my favourite recent production of a Bernard Shaw play.)

Maybe, even, Caldwell Partners – the executive search company hired to find a replacement for Maxwell – might stop cold-calling marginal British directors and consider contacting Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour instead to interview for the job?

Follow me on Twitter: @nestruck