I must say the flight was good.

After being offended by the two recent productions of H.M.S. Pinafore, I went to see the Boston production of Peter Pan, a so-called 360 presentation in a state-of-the-art theater at Boston's City Hall Plaza. It was easy to ignore the high ticket price of $75.00 since I had one of the best seats in the house, or rather tent. As I had hoped the special effects were excellent and the flying amazing, though the thin wires were far from invisible. Unfortunately other than that, the show sucked. This rewritten Peter Pan had no charm at all and in no way was a winning as the Broadway musical (which they would have been wise to have used). While the audience was filled with excited children with their one-must-assume affluent parents considerng the ticket prices, I could not tell how they felt about this show. I was especially surprised when I didn't hear loud "ahs" at the first flying scenes as one always does on Broadway. This show, according to the program, featured 23 actors—none of them especially appealing. Curiously Peter Pan was male (a rarity) and bare-chested. This was dumb, especially since it revealed a musculature that was not that of a boy but a late teen. Wendy had off-putting pigtails and both John and Michael seemed well into their twenties. Nana, a charming puppet was carried about by a highly visible puppeteer, which must have greatly confused the children in the audience. Mr. and Mrs. Darling were both ordinary, but then they had to deal with the script of some hack who deemed himself worthy of rewriting James Barrie. More irritating than anything was Tinkerbell, a talented aerial acrobat with the most annoying voice you can possible imagine. Even if the show had been good, I could not have listened to this cloying sound for long. Once again I cannot criticize the entire show because I barely got through the first act with its over-the-top pirates and far from childhood Lost Boys. I was also surprised to see Captain Hook graphically cut the throat of a pirate, an oddly violent action for a production aimed mostly at children. Having seen the Broadway musical on TV with Mary Martin, on stage with Sandy Duncan and on video with Cathy Rigby, I would proclaim all of them excellent so don't assume I have an animosity toward Peter Pan. Like the two recent versions of H.M.S. Pinafore, this is another example of arrogant producers, writers and directors who think they are much more clever the originators of time-honored material.