Ratings for Peter Pan Live! were down considerably from The Sound of Music…and viewership declined a lot last night throughout the show. That may have been a function of it airing on a school night when kids just couldn't stay up that late. Or maybe they found it as tedious in the middle as I did. I don't think this will stop networks from attempting more specials like this but if the next one drops as much…
It's interesting to see this morning how many people on the 'net saw quite a different show last night than I did. I'm wondering if Comcast subscribers got a version where Allison Williams was a lot more butch and expressive, whereas us Time-Warner Cable folks got the one where she didn't seem all that upset when she thought Wendy died, Tinker Bell was going to, Wendy went and grew up, etc. I hope Christopher Walken knew all his lines in the Comcast version.
But my friend Ken Levine liked it a lot and he is not an easy audience. Go read how he found dozens of things to fault but still gives it high marks.
I am told that if you omit all the commercials in the three-hour time slot, the show ran 2 hours and 12 minutes so that means 48 minutes of commercials. It felt like the other way around. By contrast, the last time Mary Martin did it for television, it ran in a two-hour slot with 20 minutes of commercials. The Cathy Rigby version ran one hour and 43 minutes.
I still like Rigby's best of all and I'm not trying to make a direct comparison. Rigby, after all, did it hundreds of times in front of live audiences before they ever committed it to video, whereas what we saw last night represented — what? Six weeks of rehearsals?
The DVD of Rigby's version was out of print for a while but it seems to be back, though Amazon is currently out of stock and awaiting more. No doubt, interest in the new version has caused a run on her version…and her version is six dollars. It was not videoed live. They apparently shot it repeatedly during a few performances in front of real audiences at the La Mirada Theater (its home base) one of the eighty million times it played there, then shot it some more without an audience and edited it all together. The wires were digitally removed from the video and some of Ms. Rigby's singing was redone by her to create definitive — as opposed to live — versions of key songs.
But it works really well, I think. If you have kids and you want to show them Peter Pan on TV, I'd go with that version over Martin or Williams. It's too bad you can't actually take them into a theater to see it anymore.