Allison Williams, the star of last night’s musical stunt Peter Pan Live on NBC, said that viewers shouldn’t hate-watch the program but rather should go along for the ride and try to enjoy it. Well, I certainly went along for the ride, but that doesn’t mean that Allison Williams, and the production itself, didn’t give us plenty of things to hate about it. NBC could be a bit disappointed though, viewing figures were down 50% from last year’s the Sound Of Music Live!. Here are the top five things that really creeped me out about this psychedelic fever dream of a children’s musical.
The Crocodile
Second to Bob from Twin Peaks, this is the thing that I have seen on television that is most likely to give me nightmares. Captain Hook’s nemesis was a human person in a trippy costume that looked like something out of an old HR Pufnstuf cartoon, and he just ambled across the stage to the beat of a ticking clock. They got a real dog to play Nana; they couldn’t get a real crocodile? I guess that’s silly. This bit of weirdness was far more terrifying.
The weird Native American number
There are lots of undertones in Peter Pan – about mothers, about a woman playing a man in love with a woman, about a group of men who are happy that there are no women around – but none are more problematic than the undertones about the natives of Neverland. Peter Pan and his lost boys are constantly at war with and displacing Tiger Lily and her “Indians”, but the two tribes form a pact against Captain Hook which is acted out in the song-and-dance number “Ugg-a-Wugg”. Yup. Even though NBC hired a Native American consultant and changed the song, the grunting, pantomiming, and otherwise stereotyping just made this show from the 1950s seem as outdated as it really is.
Christopher Walken’s makeup
Christopher Walken’s singing voice is bad. He sort of talked his way through all his songs much in the way Elaine Stritch would have (oh my God, imagine Elaine Stritch as Captain Hook!) but without the pizazz. That was made up for by his expert dancing and his general madcap Walken-ness, which made him kind of wacky to watch. But one thing the production had total control over was his makeup. So why on earth did he look like the corpse of Marie Antoinette? Sure, he wants everyone to eat poisoned cake, but wasn’t the wan complexion a little too much? This man is already several decades older than everyone in the cast – don’t make him look like he already went over to the other side.
Lullabies
What’s one way to jazz up a show that has been extended from two hours to three and make sure the audience stays energized throughout countless commercial breaks? Melissa Joan Hart Walmart spots? No. How about all of the sappy, melancholy slow numbers that pepper the show, mostly when one character is trying to sing another to sleep, or when Wendy is trying to woo Peter in a rowboat in a scene ripped out of The Little Mermaid? I’m not saying we needed new songs, just maybe a way to zip these up a little bit. We got lots of dance breaks, but these snooze-inducers weren’t making the production seem fast-paced.
Christopher Walken’s screeching
There were a few instances where, in the middle of a commercial break, suddenly Captain Hook would appear on screen doing something ridiculous. The most egregious was when he was just sailing on his boat and screeching for about 10 seconds. It was as if the cameras flicked back on by mistake and we caught them at an awkward moment. But, hey, at least it was a distraction from Melissa Joan Hart and her outdated gender norms at home.
