“When I was a boy, I wished I could fly…Out the window and over the trees, high as a cloud and lighter than air, then loop the loop and up to the stars! I dreamed about flying all the time…Eventually, of course, we dream other dreams. We change. We grow up. It always happens. Nothing is forever. That’s the rule. Everything ends. And so our story begins…” –Peter and the Starcatcher
“When I was a boy, I wished I could fly…Out the window and over the trees, high as a cloud and lighter than air, then loop the loop and up to the stars! I dreamed about flying all the time…Eventually, of course, we dream other dreams. We change. We grow up. It always happens. Nothing is forever. That’s the rule. Everything ends. And so our story begins…” –Peter and the StarcatcherI am thrilled to announce that this summer’s Main Session play will be Peter and the Starcatcher.
Peter and the Starcatcher tells the story of Peter Pan before he became the Pan we all know. Written by Rick Elice, with music by Wayne Barker, this theatrical adaptation of Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s best-selling novels was conceived for the stage by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers. After an off-Broadway run in 2011, Peter and the Starcatcher opened on Broadway in 2012 where it won five Tony Awards. Featuring a dozen or more actors to portray more than 100 characters, Peter and the Starcatcher uses inventive stagecraft and an infinite amount of imagination to bring the story to life.
Our story begins, as Music Theatre International describes, when a “young orphan and his mates are shipped off from Victorian England to a distant island ruled by the evil King Zarboff. They know nothing of the mysterious trunk in the captain’s cabin, which contains a precious, otherworldly cargo. At sea, the boys are discovered by a precocious young girl named Molly, a Starcatcher-in-training who realizes that the trunk’s precious cargo is starstuff, a celestial substance so powerful that it must never fall into the wrong hands. When the ship is taken over by pirates – led by the fearsome Black Stache, a villain determined to claim the trunk and its treasure for his own – the journey quickly becomes a thrilling adventure.”
I first saw this show off-Broadway a few years ago on a solo trip to New York City. In a weekend filled with great theatre, this was the show that has stuck with me ever since. Telling the story of the boy who will become Pan, it tackled familiar themes of dreams and childhood, fears and faith, greed and loss, and friendship and love with unabashed theatricality. I was transfixed by this production, finding it both wildly creative and yet charmingly simple. I immediately began to imagine this play on the Castle stage. Summer camp is a kind of Neverland, where so many of us find the freedom and grace of childhood in the wild of the woods. We hold onto our childhoods here while simultaneously discovering the types of grown-ups we will become. We find our bravery here, too; a bravery born in the liberty and trepidation of independence that we take back out with us into all the adventures yet to come.
So come set sail with us on the Castle stage this summer to fight pirates, lead a group of lost boys, and discover “the Neverland you never knew.”
“To have faith is to have wings.” –Peter and the Starcatcher
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