This is a boy ballet. I mean, a ballet about a boy. That’s a fairly uncommon experience, as ballets go. I’m racking my brains. Yes, there’s often an amusing sidekick to a prince or a hero, ‘the funny one’, the secondary part. But Peter Pan is unquestionably about a boy, a boy who will never be anything other than a boy, and the casting of said boy has to be just right for it all to hold together.
Unquestionably, in Devin Carney’s alluring and terrifically comic Peter Pan, Paul Zusi, who joined the company in 2021, gave an absolutely smashing performance. From his characteristic stance, arms akimbo and feet in wide second, boldly ready for adventure, to his clean lines, lithe leaps, flying magic, and insouciant comic timing, he dominated every scene he was in. He swung Wendy, (neat-footed Taryn Pachciarz) off her feet, in their innocent boy-girl pairing. His hand-slapping antics with the lost kids and ragamuffins make us realize that he is no more than an honorary ragamuffin himself: unsurprisingly, they are the only ones to be able to buoy his spirits, and bring him back to carefree boyhood at the end.
There was levity in Zusi’s every move, and in his timing. During his dance as a veiled female decoy to rescue Princess Tiger Lily (a first-rate performance from Amaya Rodriguez), he seizes a moment where Hook is distracted to try to bite the Princess’ handcuffs off: just what someone with more spirit than sense would do. He fails, but succeeds more conventionally later. He unceremoniously rounds off his pas de deux with Hook in a marvelously ridiculous fish-dive that rolls into a tumble. You can’t but be fond of someone who is always somersaulting themselves out of danger, and who is everywhere on stage when needed. Seeing Zusi inhabit the role so completely was such a pleasure and put me in mind of those other fictional merry pranksters, Robin Hood, Puck and Till Eulenspiegel. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the composer, Carmon DeLeone, nodded to Richard Strauss in the score.
Conductor Ramona Pansegrau brought out the merry eclecticism of the music, as befits a fantastical work. Some of it lushly leaned towards Broadway; some evoked a fairground (DeLeone borrowed Pan’s theme from an amusement park jingle he had written), and then there were references to acidic Prokofiev, as well as Bach, Poulenc, Miles Davis and Gershwin. Captain Hook, danced with pantomime exaggeration, on and off a sedan chair, by Andrew Vecseri, was as camp a character as we might have hoped for, with his foppish vanity, and blatant cowardice. There was some nice technical firepower from his flamboyant retinue of pirates in Act II.
The sets – from the pretty-in-pastels Edwardian nursery to the tropical environs of Netherland, and the gigantic stage-size pirate flag heralding the Jolly Roger – were uniformly attractive, and easy on the eye. For the rest, there was a dog (the human kind), slobbering licky kisses on the children. And a crocodile, doing groovy moves upright, before slithering off stage to the audience’s great amusement. Later, there were several iterations of a crocodile-Captain pas de deux, with of course, Hook playing the female part. He always wanted to, although clearly not with such a carnivorous partner. Irresistibly awkward.
So far, so carefree. For good measure, though, there was some bittersweet layering too, which I appreciated. We catch a glimpse of Peter’s dreamy interiority, in a rare idle moment, legs swinging, listening appreciatively as Wendy reads aloud to the children, and then a glimpse of his utter gaucheness when she tries to teach him ‘how’ to dance. Later, this inability to be anything other than a boy returns, with unexpected poignancy, when Wendy announces that they must leave the world of fantasy and return home. He storms off, in a terrible tantrum, and sulks splendidly, resisting all her attempts to lure him into the dance. She does manage eventually to make him dance with her, and we get a hint, briefly, of what a grown-up (not a playmate) partnering might look like for them – but he jerks away again, and starts kicking things, with puerile tears.
When I reflected on why I found this moving, I realized it was because it brought the narrative (almost) full circle. Wendy, portrayed at the start as the responsible eldest sister, always monitoring her brothers’ bickering, with the intimation that she is, perhaps, too good to have much fun, needs the intervention of Peter Pan to become a carefree child, for a space, before she returns to grow up. That’s her fate. But Peter Pan cannot return with her. That’s his fate. They’ll always have Neverland, I guess. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
