There are just belly laughs rolling up to the stage from the audience. At this point, the actors are just falling apart. She said, 'On second thought, maybe I can swim.' And with that, she walked off the stage, motioning her arms like you would do the swim, the dance, in 1965. And she ad libbed as best she could, as I remember. So now there is this big loop of wire hanging in front of the stage. And the hook goes zinging up into the lights and catches. She finally gets the kite, and when she yanks on it, it pops off the flying apparatus. So she has to step out into the waters that she's just told us is filled with crocodiles to grab it.

She's standing on this little papier-mache hill.īut the flying apparatus people can't quite get it close enough to her to reach. Well, of course, the kite is attached to the flying apparatus line. And she's supposed to grab it and attach it to her back and fly off. Then another thing that happened was, later on in this scene, if you remember, Wendy gets trapped on an island. But it was somewhere in here that people just started laughing at this. And I think Tinker Bell must have had an appearance in the first act. So instead of the kids sailing gracefully to and fro, they hang in the air like puppets, just dangling there and getting jerked up an inch or two or back and forth. And it becomes clear right away that the people that they've hired to run these flying apparatuses really aren't quite clear on how they actually work. Why, with just a little magic dust, one can fly.' And Peter Pan sprinkles this magic dust in the air.Īnd sure enough, the kids suddenly just lurch into the air. And Peter Pan comes in and has the little speech where he says, 'Anybody can fly. And there's a large window there, and a little bureau. And off to the left, I remember, is a big, huge wardrobe. And Peter Pan comes flying in the window.Īnd in this particular production, there's a big bed with all the three kids in it. And I don't know if you remember the opening moment of Peter Pan, but it's the three little kids sleeping in their bed. Opening night comes, and, well, almost everybody in the area, in the 10-mile radius of this theater, knows somebody in this production.

This american life fiascos