If there’s traffic on the Taconic State Parkway, head for the second star to the right and fly straight on ’til morning, which should bring you to Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in time for “Peter Pan,” Christopher Alden’s production of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play, spangled with Leonard Bernstein’s neglected music.
Here we are in Neverland, which is chartreuse, you will find, and dotted, for reasons inexplicable, with potatoes. This single set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, fizzes with playful menace, suggested most blatantly by a rickety fairground ride. The cars are flying sharks. Childhood, this play suggests, is an unsafe space. Rider beware.
If you know “Peter Pan” only from the 1953 Disney cartoon or the 1954 Broadway musical or the 1955 telecast, all now marred by casual, unapologetic racism, then you will experience this version, which ran on Broadway in 1950, as stranger, sexier, more melancholic. Not quite a musical, it was advertised at the time as a “fantasy with music.” There are eight songs, two reprises, a lot of instrumentals. Though Peter, the boy who would not grow up, might object, I’d argue that it’s a more adult work, ruefully aware that if children don’t grow up, it’s not because they’ve been spirited away to some enchanted isle.
Mr. Alden’s bouncy, mournful, occasionally abstract production seems to use a pirate’s line, “This is queer,” as mischievous inspiration. It takes that Freudian nonsense about homosexuality as developmentally immature and defiantly runs with it. (Flies with it?) Maybe this emphasis on queerness doesn’t work in every scene, but any interpretation that allows the choreographer Jack Ferver to chassé while wearing a disco ball cannot be dismissed.
