PETER PAN LIVE! It’s the pink elephant flying about the room that we obviously need to address. Holy bi-polar spewing of melodrama on social media feeds: on one hand, plenty of the usual supect-cynics; on the other, the anti-hater/I will unfriend you-threateners. Yes, yes, a celebration of musical theatre to a wide audience, particularly in viewing areas with no theatre community, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

But, is it theatre? I mean, isn’t theatre LIVE by definition? And I don’t mean “live” as in broadcast with minimal delay. I mean the audience and the performer(s) occupy the same space and can affect one another. Audience laughter, for example, can stop a show or encourage the performers to play up or play down certain elements of the scene. According to Merriam-Webster, theatre can be described as “dramatic literature: plays” and even, simply, “spectacle”. Certainly, no one would argue that PETER PAN LIVE! lacked spectacle. Ah-hmm. Oh, btw, can we all agree that anything with a built-in exclamation point is probably unworthy of such punctuation?

What we all witnessed was a teleplay. Remember the last scene in SCROOGED when Bill Murray’s former TV network is broadcasting a live version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL? A teleplay is not so much a hybrid of theatre and television as it is its own animal, really. In this case, producers used a theatrical book and score (the building blocks of musical theatre) but staged it as a teleplay. Instead of sets changing on a single stage, they were laid out inside a big studio on various sound stages. Each was lit individually and cameras could roll from one set to the next, following the actors and the story. This is very similar to how we shot soaps back in the day. Common sets like the main character’s living room or the police precinct would always stay up, while specialty sets would rotate in and out.

Marketing gurus will bicker over why the teleplay has received a recent surge in popularity. I suspect that millenials—the primary focus of these Disney throwbacks has been toward a family demographic—have grown up with so many high tech visuals, that a pared down style of entertainment seems more intimate. Who knows? Regardless, the genre can quickly become corny.

But overall, I think the tragic flaw of PPL! was the casting and choice of material. Past productions of PETER PAN have cast women in the title role for a horde of reasons: aerial safety (using an adult over a child), hours worked, gymnastic ability, vocal score, and other reasons. There’s really no need to do so for television. They could easily have found a young boy to do this one-off performance. Theatre is seen from a distance while the teleplay is seen close up—and there’s no denying Allison Williams’ gender. Although, Sarah Silverman tweeted: “There’s only two women in Peter Pan and both are Christopher Walken.” And of Mr. Walken, the character actor who can do no wrong… well… he was a kind of, sort of… a little boring. There, I said it. It was like the crocodile took his energy along with his hand. Apparently, ratings were way down from last year’s THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Allison Williams and Broadway’s Christian Borle also failed to amuse me. Off with their heads! I wonder what Disney adaption is next?