All the splendiferous things we’re looking forward to on ‘Peter Pan Live!’
Peter Pan Live! is flying onto everybody’s television screens this Thursday and I am honestly SO excited. I can’t stop talking about it. Everyone who knows me is like, “Yes, Kit, we heard you the first 10,000 times, Peter Pan, NBC, Thursday, Dec. 4, 8/7c.” No, but really.
I am one of officially 12 people on the Internet who DIDN’T hate-watch Sound Of Music Live! last year, and I am all kinds of ready to love-watch Peter Pan Live! I’d say I’m basically equally excited about Peter Pan and Christmas and, you guys, I am REALLY excited about Christmas.
Below, are a smattering of the happy things to get you crazy levels of excited about Peter Pan Live! (FYI this is a condensed list, if I actually included ALL of the exciting things, we would be reading forever.)
Allison Williams as Peter Pan!
You guys, Marnie got her dream and now she gets to be a big Broadway star! No, but seriously, Williams has been so great on edgy cable show Girls and now I’m so excited for her to be great in polar-opposite-of-edgy Peter Pan!
Christopher Walken as Captain Hook!
Theater kids, Walken CAME from musical theater, he did the national tour of West Side Story, he didn’t leave the theater and start doing “regular acting” until he was 30. Musical nerds, he is ONE OF US, and now he is coming home, give the man the 10-minute standing ovation he deserves.
Broadway talent as Mr. and Mrs Darling!
Christian Borle as Mr. Darling/Smee (we have to be OK with Mr. Darling not doubling as Hook BECAUSE WALKEN) and Kelli O’Hara as Mrs. Darling. We all remember Borle as the best thing in Smash (tied with Megan Hilty), and Kelli O’Hara has been in basically every good Broadway musical for the last 10 years. Get jazzed!
Instead of ignoring the racism in Peter Pan, Peter Pan Live! is actually dealing with it!
At least on paper, I’ve been impressed so far with how Peter Pan Live! is dealing with its portrayal of Native Americans. They’ve hired Native American actress Alanna Saunders to play Tiger Lily and Emmy Award-winning Jerod ‘Impichchaachaaha’ Tate to serve as a Native American consultant to tweak elements of the show, like the song “Ugg-a-Wugg,” so that they don’t feel straight-up racist. Rather than just letting the musical be “of its time,” producers are proactively working to make this production modern and inclusive and that is awesomely inspiring.
It’s going to win over the hate-watchers!
After the Great Sound of Music Live Hate-watch of 2013, of course a lot of people are going to TRY to hate-watch Peter Pan, but Allison Williams doesn’t think they’re going to be able to. As she told the Daily Beast:
“People will hear the opening strings of music that they know deep, deep down in their heart, and it will make them nostalgic again. And they’ll crumble. And they might get one hate-tweet out really quickly, and then we won’t hear from them for a while — because they’ll have been sucked into the sense memory that hopefully will be Peter Pan.”
For one night, all of America will be musical theater nerds!
Or at least a LOT of America will be. A whopping 22 million people watched the Sound of Music last year (and NBC reports that 44 million people watched some of the show during the month of December). Those are CRAZY numbers in this day and age of like, 5 million people watching a show if that show is SUPER lucky. So we have to ALL watch Peter Pan Live! so network television will get the memo and give us schmaltzy, sentimental, old-fashioned musical theater on the regular. Deal? Deal.
