Chattanooga theatregoers saw firsthand last Friday night the trajectory on which new Chattanooga Theatre Centre Executive Director Todd Olson is bound. Aiming for the stars, Olson welcomed an audience thirsty for light, airy summer fare, and his troupe of CTC thespians did not disappoint.
Under the direction of Scott Dunlap and Beth Gumnick, the CTC launched a production of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” a 2011 play by Rick Elice adapted from an earlier novel penned by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. The production runs through July 30.
The play, fanciful, farcical and downright fun, tells the story of a nameless and emotionally thwarted orphan boy and his comrades who are kidnapped and foisted onto the second-rate English cargo ship “Never Land” in 1885, bound for slavery in the foreign kingdom of Rundoon.
Following the tumult and travail of the ill-fated voyage, the boy with the baggage finds his identity when a mermaid entices him to bathe in the syrupy, supernatural waters of an island grotto. Emerging from the iridescent soup, the mermaid dubs the orphan boy Peter Pan – portrayed sensitively in this production by James Ogden – and the subject of this lighthearted prequel learns he can fly.
But, too, the magical plasma from the lagoon has sentenced him to an eternity of boyhood hi-jinks and juvenile mishaps in exile from Molly Aster, the daughter of a newly minted aristocrat and the lone girl passenger aboard “Never Land” with whom Peter has fallen in love.