Review: Peter and the Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 12, 2025, Matthews, NC – Though their names are similar and they’ve both written about Peter Pan, the temperamental gap between James M. Barrie and Dave Barry would seem to be as wide as oceans. Barrie created Peter in 1904 as an embodiment of eternal youth and the spirit of noble adventure. A century after Peter made his stage debut (played by a woman, of course), Barry teamed up with Ridley Pearson to write a novel-length prequel, Peter and the Starcatchers, keeping the non-fantasy base of the story in Victorian England while snatching Neverland from up among the stars and plopping it down on an earthly ocean.

What Rick Elice seems to have done, in returning the Barry-Pearson preteen page-turner to its stage origins, is to worshipfully replicate all the seagoing pirate action of Starcatchers along with Barry’s choicest quips. Then to supercharge the effect, Elice seems to concentrate it all so that it flies by in a blizzardy blur, all the more frenetic because scenery is stripped so bare – people become doors, ropes become ocean waves, and flag streamers are crocodile teeth – that we’re exercising sizable hunks of imagination to fill out what’s actually happening before our eyes.

Barrie fairies were jubilantly diced and desecrated by Barry’s mischief and mirth: or so it seemed the first three times I saw Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher – on Broadway, on tour, and at Theatre Charlotte, directed by Jill Bloede. Having read Barry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning humor pieces for decades, I was so sure of my familiarity with America’s beloved joke-and-quip machine that I never bothered to read a single page of his Starcatchers. My naïve conclusion was that Elice had simply let the Barrie-Barry mashup work its magic with as little intervention – and budget – as possible.

My fourth encounter with Starcatcher at Matthews Playhouse, once again directed by Bloede, helped to enlighten me. In her previous work with the script, the evanescence of the budding relationship between Peter and Molly Aster – and the poignancy of their parting – felt more touching to me than previously. That’s significant compensation for anyone who adores Barrie’s original story, whose magic can seem drowned in humor, wit, and shtick when first encountering Starcatcher.

This time around at Matthews Playhouse, another thematic thread struck me for the first time: Elice’s orphaned Peter reaches puberty without ever having a first or last name. By now, it will only come with his consent. At the other end of the moral spectrum, Black Stache has been searching throughout his pirate career for a hero antagonist who will perpetuate his fame.

So their first grand meeting and tussle have biblical Israel-Angel proportions and consequences, or Robin Hood-Little John echoes if you prefer a secular, literary parallel. Two combatants become permanently linked and one of them emerges with a new name. Bloede’s staging here, when Peter gets his name from Stache – and later when Pan is added on – brought a new aura to those moments.

That’s what sent me to the web in search of Barry-Pearson’s actual text. Elice’s wit and humor seemed to chime with the belly laughs Barry’s newspaper columns repeatedly deliver. But is the class clown who grew up no less jokey truly capable of such yiddishe flavor and mythic depth? My suspicions were confirmed in the very first sentence of Barry’s saga: it already includes Peter’s name! An even more amazing revelation awaits if we read on. The jokey Barry tone we know and love is nowhere to be found in the opening chapters we can sample at Amazon. Instead, Barry and Pearson were following along on the dark gallows humor path that Lemony Snicket had pioneered with his Series of Unfortunate Events books for kids.

Deep breath. In my previous reviews of Starcatcher, I repeatedly gave Barry too much credit and blame for what I had seen and much too little to Elice. Both the jokiness and the mythic dimensions of Starcatcher can be credited to Elice – with additional bravos for how thoroughly he convinces us that this is how Barry would tell the origin story of Peter Pan.

Meanwhile, community theatre in Davidson, Charlotte, and Matthews continue to reap the dubious benefit of having so little professional-grade theatre in the Queen City. What a cast Bloede has assembled! Before the show began, representatives from the North Carolina Theatre Conference presented artistic director Sarah Bumgardner with their Theatre of the Year Award for 2024. So the folks backstage with their costumes on, waiting overtime for the ceremonies to conclude, were obviously under extra pressure to deliver. Even Bloede was nervous!

No matter how good your cast is, there’s plenty of stage business to be nervous about in running Starcatcher.Actors must move all the props and furniture around and keep track of all the many Yvette Moten costumes they must find and change in and out of as we move from a London dock to two sailing ships to a faraway island with a beach, a mountain, and a jungle. Stage manager Jessie Hull had to be preternaturally adept. Molly must float in the air. Peter and some nameless alley cat must fly. A lot going on while the quips shoot out at us, many of them newly minted to mock Myers Park and nearby country clubs.

Nearly all of these players were newcomers to Starcatcher, beginning with Joshua Brand as Peter and Emma Brand as Molly, presumably arriving on the Fullwood Theater stage with ready-made chemistry. Their boy-girl antipathy is no less charming than their tentative stabs at intimacy, and both can seem fueled by the promise of adventure and ignited by its thrill. The only holdover from Bloede’s 2018 cast is Johnny Hohenstein, who in bygone days crossdressed to portray Mrs. Bumbrake, Molly’s flirtatious nanny.

With even more liberties, including more than a slight leftover effeminacy from Bumbrake, Hohenstein burst into full flower as the carnivorous Black Stache, heartily devouring the scenery in Stache’s emblematic amputation scene. His eyes shone greedily as he attacked the hambone bits, and yet a queer kind of avuncular calmness came over him as he finally met his predestined antagonist and named him. For some reason, Hohenstein drew the only problematic microphone on opening night but remained unflustered by its fussiness.

Of course, one of the glories of Peter Pan is its superabundance of meanies and piratical buffoons, and we do not lack them here. In her latest crossdressing exploit, Andrea King was the perfectly servile and supercilious Smee, with glints of valor and wickedness. Chip Bradley was the wily Slank, Captain of the Neverland,who steals the precious trunk full of starstuff from under the nose of Lord Aster, the Queen’s devoted ambassador and most eminent Starcatcher. Andrew Pippin portrayed the austere Aster with sufficient British crust, entrusted with the mission of transporting the precious starstuff cargo to Rundoon, where the trunk can be dumped into a nearby volcano and kept out of evil hands.

When we reach the faraway island where Peter and the trunk of starstuff serendipitously wash ashore, we will find that Neifert Enrique is the outré and eccentric King Fighting Prawn, monarch of the Mollusk natives. Was this the wildest of Moten’s costumes, or was it Hohenstein’s at the start of Act 2 during his brief song-and-dance as one of the Mermaids? Maybe Ryan Caulley snatches the prize toward the very end as Teacher, a salmon magically transformed into a Mermaid sage atop a lifeguard’s chair. It was a fitting reward for Caulley after a full evening gagged as Captain Scott from the first moment we saw him aboard his ship, the Wasp.

Ben Allen as Prentiss and Alijah Wilson as Ted were more individualized than Peter’s fellow orphans had been in previous productions I’d seen, and Miles Thompson was more rounded and nuanced as Alf, the smelly sailor who woos and distracts Molly’s nanny. Davis Hickson wasn’t as giddy and over-the-top as Hohenstein had been as Bumbrake at Theatre Charlotte in days of yore, so the Alf-Bumbrake thing (with Alf breaking most of the wind) was less orgiastic now and more genuinely warm.