Theatre in Review: Finding Neverland (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre)As you probably know, Finding Neverland tells the story of how James M. Barrie came to write Peter Pan, the story of the boy who wouldn't grow up. As it happens, Finding Neverland, the musical, won't grow up, either. A shameless tearjerker aimed at the family audience that lacks a new Disney musical this season, it works hard at trying to please both adults and children, but its endless harping on the joys of childhood quickly grows tedious. James Graham's book wastes no time in introducing Barrie as a wealthy, successful playwright with a beautiful, socially prominent wife -- and pretty miserable about it. The first two numbers, "If the World Turned Upside Down" and "All of London is Here Tonight," the latter taking place on the opening night of The Wedding Guest, one of Barrie's rare flops, establish exhaustively that Barrie is unhappy and creatively burnt out. In a preview of the show's taste for extremely earnest lyricism, he sings, "Just listen to those cheers/Even though I haven't had/A new idea in years/I need to find a spark inside/To lead me somewhere new." Barrie's wife, Mary, is completely oblivious to her husband's misery as long as she can throw chic dinner parties and swan around in high society. When Barrie's producer, the American Charles Frohman, can no longer keep The Wedding Guest open, he pressures the playwright to come up with another offering. By now, Barrie, hanging out in Kensington Gardens, has met Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, a young widow, and her four rambunctious sons. Much more interested in the boys than in any adult connection, Barrie further alienates Mary, eschewing her tony friends for sessions of romping with the Davies family; furthermore, he gradually begins to draw on the boys for what will become his most enduring work. One reason that Finding Neverland feels so slick and calculated is that there is a far more interesting story lurking inside it. Barrie was a complex, unhappy man, deeply wounded by the death of a brother and the rejection of his mother -- a development mentioned in the show -- and apparently was unable to deal with certain aspects of adulthood, including romantic relationships with women. Finding Neverland's treatment of Mary -- as a shrill social climber who cheats on Barrie -- is unkind, to say the least, given the fact that their apparently sexless marriage had little to offer her. (After the divorce, he never married again.) There have always been whispers of pedophilia associated with Barrie's name -- the show very gingerly acknowledges this -- but the truth appears to have been that Barrie had no sexual interest in anyone. He simply preferred to be with children, whom he romanticized beyond all recognition. In Finding Neverland, Barrie rediscovers his creative spark by getting in touch with his inner child. In real life, his inner child may have been all there was. In any case, Finding Neverland has a heavy load of uplift to sell and it does so with tremendous enthusiasm and occasional invention. The most amusing number, "Believe," draws on a 1960s Britpop style to show Barrie conveying the pleasures of the imagination to the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens, transforming it into a fantastical place filled with dancing bears and mermaids. Equally pleasing is "The Dinner Party," in which Barrie and the boys run amok at one of Mary's soirees. Both of these numbers benefit from Mia Michaels' antic, geometric choreography, which is the single most interesting thing about Finding Neverland. The rest of the score, by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, leans heavily on power ballads and earnest declarations, one or two of them -- especially "Circus of Your Mind," in which Barrie struggles to write Peter Pan -- sounding like escapees from the Frank Wildhorn oeuvre. There's a particularly silly number, "Play," in which Barrie convinces the cast of Peter Pan -- which, oddly, seems to be made up of middle-aged adults -- that they must learn to play like children in order to convincingly enact his drama. The pedestrian lyrics rely on the most basic of rhymes when not settling for false rhymes, or almost-puns that fall short of true wit. (Frohman: "You were wild about Oscar so I gave you more/I supported Bernard when no one was Shaw.") The second act pairs the tumultuous rehearsals and opening of Peter Pan with Sylvia's declining health, climaxing in a touching, if bizarrely unconvincing, scene in which the cast of Peter Pan performs the play in Sylvia's bedroom. She dies soon after -- I mean to imply no cause and effect -- and, with Mary having long-ago moved on, Barrie is left with the boys, whose legal guardianship he shares with Sylvia's mother. As finales go, it's both touching and strangely dismaying; it's lovely that the boys have someone to care for them, but the nagging question remains: Can't Barrie manage an adult relationship? This question may be why Matthew Morrison's performance feels slightly hollow; despite his considerable charm and fine voice, and for all his work at creating a Barrie who is a gentle, troubled soul, something crucial is absent. He is at his best cutting loose with the boys in the numbers mentioned above -- the rare times when he can show off his song-and-dance skills -- and he is even credible in the scenes in which he delicately romances Sylvia. But he never finds a convincing way into this contrived character. As Frohman, Kelsey Grammer harrumphs a lot and pushes Barrie to write his play; in one of the book's cleverest conceptions, Frohman comes to embody Captain Hook in Barrie's imagination, thus giving him the bit of conflict the play lacked in its early drafts. Then again, Grammer is also made the butt of a joke about his hit television series Cheers, one of the script's many examples of Peter Pandering. As Sylvia, Laura Michelle Kelly is required to look radiant and sing her ballads beautifully, which she does. Carolee Carmello is largely wasted as Sylvia's grumpy mother, who completes a 180-degree turnaround, turning warm and twinkly in time for the finale. Teal Wicks is wasted even more as the silly, shallow Mary, who, in real life, must have had a difficult row to hoe as Barry's neglected wife. Diane Paulus' direction helps to tease out the story's genuinely affecting aspects, although I wish she had managed to prune more of the many audience-baiting moments. (In another horrid example, one of the Llewelyn Davies boys, visiting a rehearsal of Peter Pan, asks one of the swishier members of Barrie's company, "Excuse me, sir. Do you believe in fairies?" The actor replies, "My good man, I work in the theatre. I see them every day." Well, it gets a laugh.) The production design -- scenery by Scott Pask, projections by Jon Driscoll -- create a turn-of-the-last-century London filled with lovely streetscapes and park views filled with greenery, combined with images of theatrical drapery, maps, and the nearly omnipresent image of a clock. Sometimes the designers swap out their storybook-illustration style for black-and-white photorealistic images, a stylistic shift that can be jarring. Still, this is an elaborate and often pleasing design. Suttirat Anne Larlarb's costumes range from beautifully detailed dresses for Mary and her friends to finely tailored suits for Barrie and Frohman and iconic Peter Pan outfits. Kenneth Posner lights everything with his innate good taste, interestingly finding some opportunities for more saturated colors than he usually does. Jonathan Deans' sound design is unnecessarily loud, especially in the first-act finale, "Stronger," in which Barrie has his creative breakthrough -- but it is difficult to know if this choice was his or that of Paulus or Harvey Weinstein, who, by all accounts, has been a notably hands-on producer. Finding Neverland leaves no stone unturned in its untiring effort to win over the audience and then guide it to tears, and, based on the audience reaction, it stands to be a hit. If its uplift feels shot through with a certain falseness, that might not matter to those seeking a night out for the whole family. Still, let's remember that the story of the Llewelyn Davies boys was much sadder than presented here. One of them died in World War I. Another was found drowned, in the arms of his best friend. Peter, who gave his name to Barrie's hero, called the play "that terrible masterpiece" and threw himself in front of a train in 1960. And there is no evidence that Barrie ever found intimacy with anyone other than his beloved boys. There are truths lurking inside Finding Neverland that no amount of fairy dust can cover up. -- David Barbour 
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