Cathy Rigby is presently on her farewell tour in the musical version of Peter Pan. She's flying all over the nation (here's the website, complete with a tour schedule) and it's been announced that the production will be in New York from November 30 through December 30 at Madison Square Garden. It's not wandering anywhere near where I might easily catch it but if it did, I'd go. I've seen Ms. Rigby three times in the role and I thought she was terrific…yes, even better than Mary Martin was, at least on TV. In fact, I thought the whole new production — though designed as a low-budget "bus-and-truck-tour" venture — was superior to the first and allegedly classic rendition. For one thing, they got rid of the two numbers in the original show that I thought were ridiculous.
One was the "Mysterious Lady" song where Peter Pan disguises himself as a woman and sings opera to entice Captain Hook. It was in the Mary Martin version and even as a kid, I always thought it was silly. You can only ask an audience to accept so much. I was willing to pretend I didn't see the wires that flew the actors about. I could even, just barely, pretend that Mary Martin — who struck me as a very nice grandmother type — was an adolescent lost boy. Where they lost me, even at age eight, was when the lady pretending to be a boy started pretending to be a lady…and Captain Hook, played by an actor who was doing a bad job of pretending to be straight, pretended to be interested in her. (Another nice, more effective aspect of this new production is that Hook is a real villain, instead of the more usual, campy portrayal. I've seen Hooks whose feet touched the stage less than Peter Pan's.)
The other thing they cut which never made any sense to me in the Mary Martin version was the ballet. Apparently, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins was determined to have a ballerina fly and dance in the show and it didn't matter to him that there was no logical place in the plot for it. So even though the magic of Peter Pan is that he can teach kids to fly and take them off to Neverland, Robbins had the maid in the Darlings' nursery (played by a trained ballet dancer) somehow learn to fly on her own and make it to Neverland without Peter's guidance. Then she dances for a bit with these people in bad, clumsy animal costumes and then she flies back home. It's a completely expendable number that stops the plot cold for no good reason, and it isn't even that interesting a dance…the most boring thing I've ever seen in a musical I otherwise like.
Anyway, the Cathy Rigby production cut those numbers and butched-up Hook to better effect…and like I said, I thought she was quite wonderful in the role. So was the whole cast in the last version of it I saw with her, which was a few years back. If you get the opportunity to see her do the role before she turns in her pixie dust, I recommend it. If not, well…there was a DVD but it's out of print and can be expensive to obtain. (The same is true of the Mary Martin version. Here's a link to the Amazon page for it.) If you have kids, take them. But if you don't, don't let that stop you.