Dancing mermaids and salty pirates: The show that revels in being ‘something Netflix can’t do’

Five minutes before Peter and the Starcatcher starts, a young audience member leans towards his parent and whispers. “It’s like a 3D screen,” he says of the stage, starry and inky blue with a sky of twinkling lights and iridescent lanterns.

At the show’s fourth preview, anticipation is high. For here is the story of how a nameless, brave and mistrustful orphan became Peter Pan, the beloved fictional boy who never grew up, who could fly and lived with the Lost Boys on Scottish author J.M. Barrie’s mythical island Neverland.

Here, in Australian company Dead Puppet Society’s reimagining of a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit, are swashbuckling pirates, disco-esque mermaids and trunks of magical dust helping to reveal the story behind Captain Hook, Mr Smee, Tinkerbell and Wendy Darling, the eldest child in the family Peter Pan first visits in Barrie’s 1904 play.

More than 100 years later, beneath Dead Puppet Society’s glowing butterflies, lightning-filled umbrellas, car-sized grinning crocodile and flying cockatoo-like yellow birds, are three lost boys, trapped below deck on a ship, who meet a 13-year-old called Molly Aster, a derring-do heroine who is Wendy’s mother.

“Is she mad at him?” asks the same young audience member mid-show, agog at Molly and Peter after they spar spiritedly on-stage.

But they’re off, adventuring into a sea storm, a crashed ship and a galley of shipwrecked Italian chefs as the enchanted dust, or “starstuff”, imbues magical properties that upend everything.

Actor and comedian Colin Lane, fresh off-stage from playing Black Stache, the villainous, bombastic and still two-handed pirate captain who becomes Hook, says Peter and the Starcatcher is riveting in its imagination.

“You can’t look away,” he says, stroking his gleaming black moustache, grown especially for the role. “It’s got everything and there’s never a dull moment. It makes everybody wide-eyed. That’s one of the special qualities of the show. It will melt even the most cynical person’s heart by the end of it.”

David Morton, creative director of Dead Puppet Society, which presents the show with Glass Half Full Productions, JONES Theatrical Group and Damien Hewitt, remembers when he and Nicholas Paine, DPS’s executive producer, saw the show’s original incarnation on Broadway in 2012.

“We thought how ridiculous that something like this can exist in that market,” he says. “Where things are usually super-heightened and not always very playful. It felt like a homage to theatre as a form.”

Adapted by playwright Rick Elice from a 2004 novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, Peter and the Starcatcher’s original production, developed by Disney Theatrical Group, used found objects for its props and sets.

“It was hyper-abstract in a way that we really loved,” Morton says. “Because our approach to puppetry and staging has always been between something real and sculptural, while also keeping it abstract and open, allowing room for imagination.

“There was a yellow bird in the play which was just a rubber glove that was shaken. Their crocodile was just two torches that were turned on. We watched its cast of 12 people take us on a massive adventure using found objects and simple staging, and we walked away going, ‘That is exactly the sort of theatre we want to make.’

“The kind that has an immediate relationship with its audience, that plays with form and isn’t two middle-aged people talking about their problems in a kitchen. The sort of storytelling that does something Netflix can’t do.”

Morton and Paine, whose company has created The Wider Earth, Holding Achilles, Laser Beak Man and Storm Boy, wondered about a version of the show that featured more designed elements.

That idea became Disney’s condition for granting a licence to do it.

“They said, ‘You guys can do this, we think you’re a perfect fit, but we want you to do the Dead Puppet Society version’,” Morton says.

“Even sometimes in our design presentations and developments, if they said that’s too close to the original, they pushed us and pushed us again and again to make something that was ours. We were going, ‘How amazing’.”

Now Dead Puppet Society’s reimagined production, which features meticulously built props and puppetry along with original costumes, lighting and additional music, is opening in Melbourne in November and Sydney in January.

A story of love, connection and loss, the show, which won five Tony Awards for the Broadway production, is a striking mix of goofball silliness and heart-stirring pathos amid pantomime, vaudeville and physical theatre.

In the Australian production, composer Wayne Barker’s original music and signature songs are aided by additional music from composer and musical director James Dobinson, who is part of the live band playing onstage.

“It’s a play with music and some songs,” Lane says. “But it’s not a musical. I think it’s created a whole new genre that needs a new name.”

It’s also a strong ensemble play. The cast of 12, who shape-shift energetically between almost 50 roles, are each a protagonist at some point.

Cast members such as Lane, Peter Helliar, who plays Smee, Paul Capsis, who is Bill Slank and Hawking Clam, and Alison Whyte, who plays Molly’s father, Lord Leonard Aster, are also salty sailors, shipwrecked chefs and ’70s-style Busby Berkeley mermaids, between operating puppets and moving props and the set.

“That’s what attracted me to the show,” Lane says. “There’s 12 of us and everybody does everything. Everybody’s moving stairs and boxes and pianos and whatnot. I don’t envisage there ever being a time when you’re going to your dressing room mid-show and just hanging out.

“You’re never on your phone, scrolling. You’re there, poised like a jungle cat. That also means your sense of character, good or bad, is just dissipated in five seconds. I’m going, ‘I’m the captain of the world’ as Black Stache, and then I turn around, and I’m holding a stick holding up a cat. My status has completely fallen.

“It’s a choreography of move and flow, and step out away, and step and let somebody in where they usually are. I don’t want to get all kind of lovey-dovey, but that’s the beauty of theatre. You absolutely come together and form this family. It’s true ensemble.”

Actor and singer Paul Capsis, who swings between playing a vicious ship’s captain and an eager mollusc, says being part of Peter and the Starcatcher inspires dedicated collaboration.

“The word for me with this show is magic,” he says. “Because of the incredible world created, the lighting, the beautiful puppets and just watching everybody on stage doing their wonderful work. But also inhabiting the characters. I never thought I’d be playing a captain of a ship, so I’m very grateful.”

Paine laughs. “I thought you were going to say ‘playing a clam’,” he says of Capsis’ character Hawking Clam.

Actor Alison Whyte, who plays Lord Aster, agrees. “Your clam work is very good,” she says.

Whyte, who recently appeared with Anthony LaPaglia in Death of a Salesman, says the show feels gripping.

“I love the fact that it never lets you forget that we’re storytelling,” she says. “And slipping in and out of characters, moving props and set, the sense of ensemble, it’s not being locked into one character. It’s really liberating.”

Peter and the Starcatcher also allows Lane and Helliar to riff spontaneously.

After Black Stache, a flamboyant ham who declares his dislike of children, takes a moment in the play to flaunt his brilliance, a chuckle of taunts, from children to grown-ups, flies back.

“Shut arrrp,” Lane mouths back, beginning a pantomime tit-for-tat audience-actor parley that builds over many minutes to comedic heights.

Lane, mindful of the show’s different moods and story elements, relishes points where improvisation can soar.

“You have to build up a comedy bank,” Lane says. “You have to deposit things that give you a connection to the audience and by the time you get to the second half, people are like, ‘Yep, we’re absolutely with you, we’re all-in.’

“I love that stuff. It’s so much fun mucking around with audiences and the fourth wall. The audience is seeing something that tomorrow night’s audience is not going to see.

“That’s what people love about theatre, the live element of it. They’re all sitting close together, all of us this far apart in this weird little black box, and we’ve basically got them prisoner for two hours and we can kind of do whatever we want. We’re doing 200 shows in the next six months and every show is going to be different.”

Morton says Peter and the Starcatcher’s heart lies, in some ways, in its imperfections.

“It is genuinely being told every night,” he says. “We’re not set to musical timing or a rigid way that the scenes need to be played. There’s a playfulness and, when something goes differently, it usually goes better. It’s definitely the first show I’ve been involved in where watching it every time there’s an utter joy.”

And, amid its comedy, ensemble and hand-built puppetry and props, Peter and the Starcatcher remains a moving tale. The story of an adventuring girl called Molly and a nameless boy who becomes Peter may bring audiences to tears.

“I think it was one of the reviews of the original that said, ‘Peter and the Starcatcher, it teaches you to laugh until you cry’,” Morton says.

Lane agrees.

“I’m a pretty cynical comedian,” he says. “But there are moments of such beautiful emotion in the play’s trajectory, they get me every time.”

He turns to Whyte. “What did you say to me the other day? ‘We build them up and then we just stab them in the heart’.”

Peter and the Starcatcher is at the Playhouse Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, November 8 to December 1; and at the Capitol Theatre, Sydney, from January 31.