Peter Pan Panned

12.5.2014
News
Sarah Fisher
  

Last night's three hour production of Peter Pan Live! is getting panned. Peter Pan was played by Allison Williams, HBO's Girls star and, more importantly, daughter of NBC newser Brian Williams.  Did I mention it was broadcast on NBC? Of course it was.

Writes the Daily Beast:

Allison Williams as Peter Pan, on the other hand, was the worst thing the iconic cross-dressing orphan with the Oedipus complex could be: Just fine. Allison Williams sang… well. Her accent was… fine. Her stage presence was… there. It was strange, then. She looked like a Peter Pan. She crowed like a Peter Pan. But she just wasn’t Peter Pan.

The Associated Press wasn't much nicer:

HBO "Girls" star Allison Williams was admirable in a role made famous by Mary Martin and Cathy Rigby. Her voice wasn't strong but it was true and she was game for plenty of physical effort. She radiated a weird male energy, but the telecast revealed a lot of weird stuff in the script. This wasn't the Disney version of "Peter Pan" and its odd, old British roots were showing.

Her voice wasn't strong, but it was true?!? What does that even mean? It sounds like something American Idol judges would say right before the hook comes out for a bad contestant.

New York Daily News described the show as "long and flat":

Peter Pan may have overcome the tyranny of time, but he couldn’t surmount the constrictions of a television screen.

Or a wooden screenplay.

NBC’s annual live musical event had spirit and lively dancing Thursday night. It also felt long and flat, even when it briefly morphed into a superhero showdown.

Tom and Lorenzo analyzed:

There’s nothing remotely masculine about Allison Williams. There is not even anything about her that one could characterize as “child-like.” Never once throughout the entire story did we lose sight of the fact that a grown woman was pretending to be a little boy. In this day and age, it’s kind of hard not to see that as a little creepy; especially when the entire story hinges on this grown woman breaking into a bedroom full of children in the middle of the night and essentially abducting them.

And the Twitterverse wasn't impressed either.

 

 

 

 

 

We'll see if NBC decides to put on another "live" entertainment event next year and continue to butcher the classics of yesteryear. The 2013 Sound of Music production was not well received either.

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