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LONDON TICKET

An exciting West End winter brings a controversial Peter Pan, smashing Cinderella, Sondheim, Cyrano & Oscar Wilde

by Sheridan Morley

WINTER WONDERLAND London theatergoers still turn unexpectedly traditional at this time of year-though we can expect some subtle twists and turns on the old family classics. Consider Peter Pan at the National for instance: Ian McKellen is doing the traditional double of Mr. Darling and the villainous Captain Hook, but with a boy now playing Peter and Alec McCowen wondering around the set as J.M. Barrie himself, pointing up the chilly contrast between an apparently innocent bedtime story and the dark forces of evil, death, and, yes, even homosexuality, which lie buried only just beneath the waters of Peter's magic kingdom. Never before onstage or screen, and only very seldom in print, even now almost a century after the first production, has it been noted that there was something distinctly uneasy about Barrie's relationship with the five "lost boys" he virtually adopted around the boating lake in Kensington Gardens and who became the models for his story.

Two of those boys took their own lives, one because he was caught up in a homosexual scandal that he feared could hare Barrie's considerable reputation, and the other because after 50 years he could no longer stand the strain of being known as "the real Peter Pan." It is a dark and mysterious story, and we are only now beginning to cut through the tinsel and finally discover what truly lies in the back of Barrie's often fearful imagininigs.

For those who prefer their Christmas shows a little less threatening, we also have a first-ever West End staging of Bugsy Malone, the classic splattergun movie about the girls and boys who inherited Capone's Chicago empire in the thirties and turn it into a wildly funny parody of every kid-gangster stunt you have ever seen on the wide screen. After the Godfathers, we know have the Godsons, and they sing a lot better, too.

Elsewhere, for those who like their classics overtaken and updated, we also have (at the Picadilly) Matthew Bourne's breath-taking Cinderella, moved to the middle of the 1943 Blitz, so that the ball she finally goes to just happens to be tat the Cafe de Paris the night they bombed Snakeships Johnson and effectively put an end to all London cabaret until even now we are struggling 50 years later to get it back on its West End feet. But the miracle of Bourne and his brilliant young dancers is that for the first time since Diaghilev in the 1920s, he has torn ballet out of the specialist dance houses and set it up on a commercial eight-shows-a-week basis, there to challenge all the other big musical hits from Phantom to Cats.

Treats around the fringe include the first-ever staging of Stephen Sondheim's very first score, one called Saturday Night, which has never until now surfaced from his trunk, though one or two numbers from it have been heard in the anthology Marry Me a Little.

BUCKLE YOUR SWASH, GADZOOKS At the Lyric we now have Antony Sher as the dueling Cyrano de Bergerac, while The Three Musketeers are riding toward Shaftesbury Avenue hotly pursued by the evil Madame de Winter. Other big musicals on the horizon (apart from Chicago, which has already become the hottest ticket in town thanks to some massive publicity and the unusual double act of Ute Lemper and Ruthie Henshall)

[[image]]Alec McCowen plays J.M. Barrie in the National's Peter Pan

[[Page]] 72 www.playbill.com PURE THEATRE ONLINE

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RALPH FIENNES
CATE BLANCHETT

[[image of Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett]]

THEY WERE TWO IMPROBABLA DREAMERS WHO DARED TO PLAY THE GAME OF LOVE, FAITH, AND CHANCE.

OSCAR and LUCINDA
THE NEW FILM FROM ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR GILLIAN ARMSTRONG.
[[illegible movie credits]]
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EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENTS START DECEMBER 31ST IN NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES
COMING SOON TO THEATERS EVERYWHERE

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