Peter Pan LIVE!

Recently, NBC (a 'broadcast' TV network)  aired a 'live' production of the time honored musical 'Peter Pan'. We recorded it because we record anything that includes Christopher Walken, we love that guy. We had no real interest in the too many, too white toothed young lady playing the so-called 'starring' role. There's a very long, curious tradition of having cutesy, flat chested women play the eponymous male lead. I don't know why. Maybe it's the music.

As it turned out, we watched it pretty much live, for background noise, as we spent the entire evening assembling a new TV stand/cabinet that we bought for our family Christmas present. It will replace the two Ikea tables the flat screen currently straddles.

Between the satellite  receiver, the DVD and the sound bar, which is the entirety of our media arsenal, the interconnecting cables are strewn between the TV and the hand-made shelf where the black boxes sit, looks like a sloppy garage-inventor's science experiment. The new cabinet will confine and contain all of that, or so we hope.

The new cabinet came delivered in a flat pack about the size of a refrigerator. Inside were six hundred wood pieces and a shoebox full of hardware. Yes, there was also a hex wrench, which those of you familiar with flat pack furniture would recognize immediately. I have a drawer full of them. I hope to eventually have enough of them to weld together to form a piece of furniture itself, because I love irony.

So while we sorted and laid out all the pieces and started the complex sub-assembly of doors and shelves, 'Peter

Pan' came on with all the pomp and flare of a major production. We weren't really watching it closely, mostly on breaks, but after about forty five minutes we stopped the torture and pulled up saved episodes of 'Pawn Stars' instead. 

The first thing that irked me was the lip synching. . not just on the songs. If you watched closely it looked as cheesy and out of sync as those awful, old Kung-Fu movies.

The second thing that I noticed was the music itself. All the songs sounded like they were composed on one of those pre-digital chord organs that kids got in the 60's and 70's. You know, they only had like one and a half octave's worth of keys, with the emphasis on the high notes. 

The music had no range. That might have been fine in the old days, when TV's were only equipped with a single three inch speaker. That just doesn't meet muster anymore. Even the cheapest TV's built in the last twenty or so years have stereo and the capability of blasting out a full-range wall of sound.

I remember watching the Mary Martin version of this musical back in the day. I was very, very young, but even then I thought the songs were less than memorable and the 'flying' looked cheesy, exactly like someone being strung up on an ill-controlled cable.

In fifty years, for this production anyhow, no advances in technology have been imported into the work. The music is still thin, the cables used to suspend the actors still seem like an afterthought, and the performers shouted their lines like they were performing in an open amphitheater. Even early 'Dr. Who' episodes had better 'special' effects.

No, I don't attend a lot of musicals and plays. I simply don't care for most of them. 

Maybe you just never really watched a good one!

How wrong you are!

1993, center row seats, the Palace Theater (Broadway) in New York City. 'The Will Rogers Follies' starring Mac Freaking Davis and Marla Maples (one of Donald Trump's concubines/ex-wives). The booming un-bodied voice of Ziegfeld was none other than Gregory Freaking Peck. This show ran for three years and won six 'Tony' awards (whatever that is). I remember it mostly for the allegedly trained dogs used to take the place of actual rodeo animals and the absolute awkwardness of sitting next to my devoutly religious female boss watching a jolly, dancing, chorus line of quite handsome young men and women who were apparently never taught that you are supposed to wear cowboy chaps over trousers, not instead of.
Awkward.

Live theater is a highly interactive form. With a live audience the performers can see and hear the crowd and will always react to it, at least a little. They have to pause for prolonged applause and laughter, and they can hear their own punch lines fall flat. Botches, stumbles, goofs, forgotten lines all become part of the performance. Mac Davis even snuck in one of his own original songs the night I attended. Live theater is indeed a different endeavor, with its own set of quirks and limitations. No re-takes, no touch-ups, no swapping out of defective props, you go out and punch through it with just what you brung.

I get that. There is a certain nostalgic charm to a live performance.
No one I know would pay good money to see a recorded/filmed episode of a TV sitcom at a crowded theater. We want, we expect, bigger, bolder, better.
So rather than adapt the production to newer, readily available technology, NBC figured that what the people want was to see an actual stage play. . .
Except for major metropolitan centers, live theater is mostly an amateur/volunteer effort. That is precisely because it isn't really all that popular. Like jazz and classical music, art galleries, operas and symphonies, not enough people are willing to pay for it to actually support it anywhere but major markets. 

That charm though, rarely translates well  to TV or the cinema. "Peter Pan, the Movie' better be polished and technically flawless. No clumsy ad-libbing, no sets falling. We have different standards for different platforms, even between TV and the big screen.

So most of us in flyover country, from the eastern-most states to that socialist bastion of southern California, have never seen an actual Broadway play. (I only went because IBM wanted to feature my boss and myself in a promotional video and treated us to a trip to the Big Apple that included fancy restaurants, Park Avenue lodging, our own executive host, etc. (Without really knowing it, we did some IT things centered around one of Big Blue's platforms that were years ahead of IBM's capabilities. Long story. For those of you who worked at Litton back then, you'll remember the 'Barcode System', yeah, we actually got rewarded and nationally recognized for that wad of tangled twine and tin-foil.))

Otherwise, if any, our only experiences with live performances are school plays and amateurish, second/third string touring venues.

Sure, we know a lot of the music. I recall as a handsome young child, my saintly mother dropping the 'Oklahoma' LP onto the RCA Hi-Fi and singing along with 'Surrey With the Fringe on Top' and 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning.

 It would be years, decades, before I actually saw a performance of the classic, the film version, on TV, all polished and rehearsed, yet still a little creepy.(The frozen, unblinking 'I Cain't Say No'). I liked some of the by-then nostalgic music, but as a movie. . . thin plot, one dimensional characters, contrived and hammy dialog, it appeared obvious that no one ever involved in the musical had ever actually been to Oklahoma.

I saw many other film renditions of Broadway blockbusters, the same ones you've likely seen, Music Man, Sound of Music, Springtime for Hitler. . . . I got it. Broadway is actually about music.

Write some catchy songs, wrap a script, any script, around it. 

So even at their best, Broadway musicals are lame. 

NBC, the least you could do before bringing it to my HD flat screen is to fix it up a little. You CGI'd Tinkerbell (not a  euphemism), you used the technology to allow for lip-syncing, Why couldn't you just go ahead and act like it was at least 1982 and lose the wires, buy a new dog costume, etc.

Christopher Walken was not a disappointment. 

What's that?

You see, Walken didn't need this thing. He's set. He's already an icon. Sure, he looked like he first read the script the day before, sure, he may have been intoxicated, sure, sure, he phoned it in. 

His job was simple. Get people to tune in.

Miss Amerca/Miss Universe get gigs like that all the time.

"Join us at The Crosstown Megamall Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!!!  Miss America will be there! And Monster Trucks!

It's not about what she will actually do at the Megamall, nobody cares if she does anything at all, just being there IS the job.

"Join us tonight for a live performance of the off-Broadway musical 'Little Bo Peep' (Starring yet another 'American Idol' has-been) . . .And featuring the venerable Betty White as the sheep!

Yeah, you'd watch that. . . . Betty White, as a sheep.

So Walken did not disappoint. He hammed, staggered, acted like he was in his own little show. Good for him.

Of the actual, professional reviews I've skimmed, you could easily discriminate between the 'cultured' theater lovers and the TV critics. Theater snobs extolled the virtues of the cable work. . . seriously, and gushed over how the star's voice 'rarely' cracked.

Theater people have incredibly low entertainment standards.

NBC presented this tripe to an audience renowned for posting harsh comments on social media about an incorrect sound effect, or obscure historical and geographical mistakes, minor continuity flubs, etc. Not a very forgiving crowd.

To the more contemporary and sophisticated media watcher, 'Peter Pan Live' looked like little more than a rough middle school play.

Broadway doesn't have wide appeal outside of the NYC elite. Sure, tourists crowd the theaters on a once per lifetime visit to that awful city, but they all go back home to a place that can't be bothered to support or encourage that sort of thing. 

In the ratings, this recent effort only received about half the viewers of last year's "Sound of Music" attempt. It was watched by fewer people than an average and non-vital NFL game (Who even watches Football?). Of course 9.2 million people sounds like a big audience, but for NBC that's not very impressive, especially that real-time ratings measurement indicated that "Peter Pan' lost over a third of its viewers during the show. NBC, because it is a standard, can get 1.4 million viewers if they broadcast a test pattern.

Broadway simply isn't as big a deal as it is hyped to be. In nearly twenty years, 'Cats' one of the longest lasting, most-seen Broadway shows ever, was seen by ten million people, total. Compare that to the single, last episode of the by-then floundering, preachy and tedious TV show M.A.S.H, which was watched by over fifty million people. Five times more people watched that one single TV episode than ever saw 'Cats' live on Broadway over the course of 18 years of almost daily performances. Rush Limbaugh gets twice the lifespan 'Cats' audience, 20 million listeners, per week.

I would estimate that half the remaining audience, those that stuck it out, were, like us, only using it to occupy space and time until something else became available.

Bottom line, content matters. More than 'format' people want quality. NBC pushed the format 'Live'. They did not alter the script, the staging, the framing, the content, the choreography, the technology, to fit the small screen. More importantly, they showed they have no real idea what the average TV viewer really wants.

Even though it is actually right under their nose. Check the other channels NBC. The 'small' cable companies are raising the bar on you.