San Francisco Playhouse’s “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” starts at such a high pitch that it’s hard to imagine the comedy could get much funnier as it goes along. It kicks off with actor Terrance Austin Smith playing a bumbling, nervous stagehand in the play-within-a-play, stumbling hilariously through an opening night curtain speech.
But by the end it’s highly likely that audience members are fully laughed out. That’s just how inventive and go-for-broke director Susi Damilano and her topnotch cast are.
She previously directed “The Play That Goes Wrong” with the same playwrights: Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer. In a review of that 2024 Playhouse production, I wrote “Susi Damilano knows how to up the comic ante.” This production is even better.
“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” draws from by J.M. Barrie’s classic 1904 play and novel about a boy who never grew up.
And the stakes are higher. There’s not just mayhem but an intense story at the heart of the comic chaos. It’s a play-within-a-play: a production of “Peter Pan” by a community theatre in which the director, the technicians and the scenic designer are practically criminally incompetent.
Peter, a charming and touchingly vulnerable boy who can fly, is played by Ezra Reaves. Peter lives far away with other Lost Boys, and on this occasion, he shepherds the Darling children—Wendy (Maggie Mason), John (Greg Ayers) and Michael (Joe Ayers)—through the night skies to his chosen home. There they encounter the evil Captain Hook (Jomar Tagatac), a shipful of incompetent pirates, the silent and magical Tinkerbell (Renee Rogoff), and . . . well, you know the story.
Among the fictional community theatre’s faux pas:
The crew in the light booth gossips maliciously, forgetting to turn off the mic and causing the actors to freeze onstage in horror.
One cast member never learned his lines at all and is coached by prompts through headphones which occasionally get crossed with radio signal that he faithfully parrots. Another cast member is utterly paralyzed by stage fright. Nana the obedient dog/housemaid continually gets stuck in the doggie door.
The increasingly frustrated narrator (Phaedra Tillery-Boughton) is swept on and off stage in a runaway easy chair.
Peter Pan inevitably makes his first entrance by swooping into the Darling children’s bedroom, accidentally tangled in his flying ropes and upside down.
Sound cues run amok, set pieces and props fall apart in ways that are seriously dangerous, and timing goes wacko.
Cody Tellis Rutledge’s varied set design includes a stage that revolves–at times at an almost dizzyingly rapid pace–and a wonderfully fanciful Darling children’s bedroom.
High points along the way are a few song and dance numbers and an audience participation moment that really works.
Plus, the elements of the beloved Peter Pan story—the lost, unloved little boy and his relationship with Wendy—are, amid the hilarity, quite touching.
Of course, in real life plays do go wrong, although not this wrong. This play goes wildly right.
San Francisco Playhouse’s “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” continues through Nov. 28 at 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $60 to $145 at sfplayhouse.org.