Very pleased with Peter Pan reviews - a selection follows.....Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and Independent

Financial Times 19/12/06

Small masterpieces of compression

By Ian Shuttleworth

Published: December 19 2006 16:15

The King’s Head’s Peter Pan (adapted and directed by the widow of Dan Crawford, the King’s Head’s onlie begetter, and starring his stepdaughter) is a miracle of compression. Not all the cast of 22 can fit on to the tiny stage at the curtain call. When fight scenes spill all over the auditorium, for once it feels not gimmicky but necessary.
This artistic shoehorning is most palpable in the production’s unique selling point: this is the theatrical premiere of the full score written by Leonard Bernstein; only five of the nine songs he wrote were presented in its 1950 Broadway run. Musical supervisor Mike Dixon has compressed Bernstein’s orchestrations into arrangements for a trio: piano, cello and flute/piccolo/clarinet.
Stephanie Sinclaire manages to compress J.M. Barrie’s play to make room for the songs in a two-hour show. The main Neverland section is exuberant, with Katherine Kastin as an ebullient Peter. But there is no countervailing sense of humanity among the “earthly” characters, and Lisa Holliman’s Wendy never balances her wide-eyed wonder with the down-to-earth practicality that makes her a surrogate mother to the Lost Boys and even Captain Hook’s pirates.
Nevertheless, it turns the most cramped theatre in London into a place of fun and fantasy for a brief while, and when Peter made his famous appeal to the audience to revive the dying Tinkerbell (Dixon’s little daughter Meg, with the cutest snub nose this side of the animated titles to Bewitched) by clapping our hands, even hard-bitten critics were applauding like billy-o.

Sunday Telegraph 24/12/06

Tim Auld
4 out of 5 stars

Peter Pan at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington feels rather more familiar [than The Enchanted Pig at The Young Vic}. The auditorium crowded with rickety chairs; the cramped stage with one painted flat for scenery; the dog played by an unfortunate adult in a preposterous, fluffy costume. Yes, it’s the school Christmas play. Only, it’s categorically not.

Despite the physical limitations, the production and performance values could not be higher, and that’s before one even mentions that the director, Stephanie Sinclaire, is making theatre history. This is the first time Leonard Bernstein’s score and lyrics for the play have been performed in their entirety, and though it would be going too far to say it’s a revelation, it’s a chamber piece of great charm, fun and emotional richness.

The score, arrange by Mike Dixon, for three performers (piano; clarinet, flute and piccolo; and cello), is lyrical, jazzy and ripe with pastiche and nostalgic elegy. As with The Enchanted Pig, it places narrative above musical fireworks, allowing a versatile cast, led by Lisa Holliman as a sweet, pure-voiced Wendy, to crack on with the story. For children it’s a snappy, no-nonsense telling (though, for my taste, Hook could have been more sinister); for adults it’s a troubled tale of burgeoning sexuality. And, because it starts at 5pm, you can have the children home in time for bed.

The Independent
Peter Pan, King's Head Theatre, London ***
Bernstein score takes flight at last
By Paul Taylor
Published: 27 December 2006

The intimate and inimitable King's Head - London's first pub theatre - is not, because of its cosy dimensions, the ideal venue for a piece that requires aeronautical antics. Any actor fool enough to be strapped into a harness at this address would run the severe risk of concussing himself and/or members of the audience. But though Peter Pan and the Darling children create the illusion of flight merely by standing on hydraulically rising pedestals and stretching out their arms, Stephanie Sinclaire's delightful production - of her own adaptation synthesised from J M Barrie's various versions of his self-invented myth - is uplifting in other ways.
For a start, it's always a pleasure when a small theatre plays paradoxical host to a proverbial cast of thousands, and here the hordes of pirates, mermaids, Lost Boys and Indians who swarm over the pint-sized, greenly glinting Never Land conjure up a sense of magical absurdity.
Then again, this Peter Pan can lay claim to be pioneering. In 1950, roughly halfway between his hit shows On the Town (1944) and West Side Story (1957), Leonard Bernstein wrote the score for a musical revival of the Barrie classic. It starred Jean Arthur, who turned 50 during the run, as "The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up" and Boris Karloff, better known for portraying Frankenstein's Monster and Dr Fu Manchu, as Captain Hook. Neither of them was up to snuff vocally. Of the six songs written by Bernstein, four were performed in cut versions, while his incidental music was dropped in favour of the work of another composer.
So the King's Head show is the first time that the score - replete with "Hook's Soliloquy", a number written for a tour that never came off, and "Dream With Me", a closing song that failed to make it into the original production - has been performed in its entirety in a full staging. The tunes are lovely; the wit (Bernstein was his own lyricist) is deft and mischievous; and the new arrangements by Mike Dixon, which orchestrate the music for piano, cello and (alternately) clarinet, piccolo and flute, combine breadth and crisp clarity, managing to project everything from dreamy sensuality to the tongue-in-cheek attack of Tiger Lily's Indian Dance with her Braves.
Hook - brilliantly played with a flamboyant, nervous energy and drolly self-guying swagger by the hilarious Peter Land (who doubles as a neurotically sly and cowardly Mr Darling) - enjoins his comrades to "Eat blood!/Drink blood!/ Dream blood!/ Think blood!" in the cod blood-curdling "Pirate Song", while in his furious mock-operatic solo, he bewails the fact that, though he'd always fancied making a big, showy dying speech, now that he's actually confronting death, there's just no time for it. With shells for bosom-covers, the delicious Mermaid Chorus sing solipsistically of the lazy, hazy sea-and-sand delights of an island where "Troubles don't exist/ No one is a pessimist..."
But Bernstein's score does not do justice to the darkness and tragedy in a piece where the title character is the arrested victim as well as the buccaneering beneficiary of his defensive refusal to accept the responsibilities of adulthood. Peter and Wendy are very well played here by Katherine Kastin and Lisa Holliman respectively - the former signalling the pain of self-exclusion, the latter the wistful frustration of flirting with a hero who is determined to treat her as an underage mother-figure and to remain clueless about more hormonal forms of love. Bernstein gives Wendy some beautiful songs of precocious awakening, but the finale "Dream With Me" is a dramatic fudge that pretends that, in dreams, the two of them will be able to enjoy the kiss never taken, the love never acted upon. Listening to this false consolation, I was reminded how, in the celebrated Trevor Nunn/John Caird version of the myth, Barrie was himself a character who pointed out, at the end, that Peter had "ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred".