La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Fly’ takes wing with rousing music, humor and a memorable Hook

Storm Lever as Wendy with the Lost Boys in La Jolla Playhouse’s “Fly.” (Kevin Berne)

New riff on the ‘Peter Pan’ saga, directed by ‘Hamilton’ producer Jeffrey Seller, cleverly ties story threads together as it explores the struggles of growing up

By James Hebert

Peter Pan has amnesia. Wendy is grappling with grief. Tink seems destined for anger management. Captain Hook suffers from some serious mommy issues.

A therapist could make out like a bandit (or a pirate) by setting up shop in the neurotic Neverland of the musical “Fly,” which just opened a funny, affecting and visually arresting new production at La Jolla Playhouse.

You might argue that anyone trotting out yet another stage exploration of the Peter Pan universe could use some counseling, too: There have been two Pan-related shows on Broadway in just the past eight years, including the Playhouse-launched “Peter and the Starcatcher.”

But while “Fly” shares some of that last work’s sly, self-referential vibe, the splashy new show — under the kinetic direction of “Hamilton” producer Jeffrey Seller — proves to have something to say all its own.

That’s thanks firstly to Rajiv Joseph’s inspired reconception of the original 1911 J.M. Barrie novel “Peter and Wendy,” which threads the theme of growing up (or fierce resistance to that notion) into every element of the story — and in the process ventures clever new connections between Neverland’s Lost Boys and their sworn enemies, Captain Hook’s pirates.

“Fly” also speaks through the tribal beat of Bill Sherman’s propulsive score, which levitates the show via the thump of drums echoing across Anna Louizos’ intricate and exotic Neverland set, with its spiky thickets of bamboo.

Speaking of levitation: Yes, there’s a whole lot of flying (as designed by the aerial expert Pichón Baldinu) in “Fly,” starting when Peter (Lincoln Clauss) crashes in through a window and cajoles Wendy (Storm Lever) to soar off with him to Neverland.

Flying, though, requires forgetting. As that smack-talking fly girl Tink (a memorably live-wire Isabelle McCalla) puts it, once she flits in: “Memories are heavy. They weigh you down.”

So Wendy has to put out of mind the doting dad she leaves behind — her young brothers are excised from this version of the story, and her mom has died — in order to get airborne with Peter, whom the likable Clauss lends a kind of fierce naiveté.

There’s no sleight-of-strand to the flying: The cords that carry the actors aloft are very visible. But there’s grace and bravery to it just the same.

That goes double for the compact, big-voiced Lever, the welcome San Diego returnee (of the Playhouse and Broadway’s “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” and the Old Globe’s recent “Almost Famous”), whose assertive and appealing Wendy becomes the center of the story.

As envisioned by writer-lyricist Joseph (a Pulitzer finalist for “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), co-lyricist Kirsten Childs (of “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin” renown) and composer Sherman (who’s had a hand in everything from “In the Heights” to “Sesame Street”), “Fly” admirably celebrates female strength and spirit.

That aspect is embodied not just in Wendy but in the beguiling Crocodile (Liisi LaFontaine) and her sylph-like entourage, as well as the show’s odes to that supreme being known as Mom.

Cue the ultimate mama’s boy — the allegedly terrifying Captain Hook. And in that role of the head pirate with the metal extremity, behold Eric Anderson, the Broadway veteran and onetime San Diegan who single-handedly (sorry) unleashes a boatload of comic energy.

His Hook is agreeably bananas — a sulky, sword-wielding poet of self-absorption who leads his pirate band in a chant of “Mama proxy!” — a reference to Wendy, whom he wants to make their collective surrogate mom. (“It’s very healthy!” he insists, unconvincingly.)

The Lost Boys, whose feral, junkyard-chic get-ups are among costume designer Paul Tazewell’s best looks, rival the pirates in comic zip. And they get one of the show’s best numbers: “We Not Boys,” a syncopated, percussion-driven burst of attitude that has the performers dropping drumsticks like mics at the close.

Co-choreographers Andy Blankenbuehler and Stephanie Klemons (who both worked on “Hamilton”) have the troupe moving in eye-catching, angular patterns to the sounds of music supervisor/arranger/orchestrator/conductor Will Van Dyke’s band; Howell Binkley’s lighting and Nevin Steinberg’s sound add to the atmosphere of lush mystery.

A few elements could use tuning up: The early establishing number “Fly” feels a bit more Broadway-generic than the rest of the score, and the script probably could lose a groaner joke or two (such as the overextended gag about the word “mayonnaise”).

But there’s a real sense of the raw and bittersweet playing beneath the late-in-show laments of Hook, who by this time is halfway to becoming Edward Scissorhands.

And it turns out that “Fly” is at its most moving when it contemplates, after a long journey, finding a place to land.

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