‘Finding Neverland,’ a paint-by-numbers origin story

Once upon a time (and very long ago), Peter Pan was a highly anticipated NBC television special starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard that brought with it much the same high anticipation of rarely seen, pre-video-era airings of “The Wizard of Oz.” Peter’s first flight through the Darling family’s nursery window became one of those inexplicably wondrous moments that remained permanently etched in memory.

In recent decades, the boy who lost his shadow and never wanted to grow up, has suffered from overexposure. Not only has his story been told in multiple formats — as plays and musicals, in animated and dramatic films, as new television specials, as ballets, and in books that riff freely on the tale first spun by J.M. Barrie, the Scottish novelist and playwright. But Peter’s persona also has been co-opted to describe everything from the arrested development syndrome, to an airlift of Cuban children to the United States, to a long popular brand of peanut butter.

Now comes the high-styled “Finding Neverland,” the musical that opened on Broadway in 2015 and was inspired by the 2004 film starring Johnny Depp as Barrie, and Kate Winslet as his young, prematurely widowed friend and muse, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whose four sons inspired his classic play, “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up.”

The musical spins the Peter Pan “origin” story (laced with a stark streak of mortality), and, in the process, suggests how Barrie drew on his own personality, as well as his interaction with the Llewelyns, to craft a work that transforms real life into theatrical fantasy. Though it bears a slight echo of Baum’s “Oz” stories (in which Dorothy’s family becomes the characters in her dream), it has little of their subtle magic.

With a well-crafted if generic score by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, and with a book by James Graham that spells out far more than necessary (and would have benefited from a major trim), “Neveland” has now arrived at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in a lavishly staged, ingeniously designed national touring production.

Directed by Diane Paulus (whose revivals of “Pippin” and “Hair” left me singularly cold), and choreographed by Mia Michaels (whose credits include “So You Think You Can Dance” and Cirque du Soleil’s “Delirium”), the show can be charming and eye-popping one moment, but irritatingly hyper-active and heavy-handed the next. Too often there is the sense that its creators could never quite decide whether it should be geared to adults or children. And in place of mystery there is psycho-babble and eccentrically stylized movement.

It all begins as Barrie (the understated Kevin Kern), a previously successful London playwright who has hit a creative wall, is given one last chance by his American producer, Charles (Tom Hewitt), to pen a show that will fend off bankruptcy. A chance encounter in Kensington Gardens with the wealthy but mournful Sylvia (played with notable simplicity and grace by Christine Dwyer), and her four young sons, who miss their father, turns out to be fortuitous in many ways as each brings the other back to life in unexpected ways.

Barrie, shy and self-doubting, is locked in an unhappy marriage with Mary (Crystal Kellogg), a status-seeking ex-actress, and is clearly attracted to Sylvia, just as, despite the warnings of her mother (Joanna Glushak), she is drawn to him. (They later share a beautiful duet, “What You Mean to Me.”) Barrie also is taken with Sylvia’s children, particularly the bookish, depressed Peter (Ben Krieger), who could be something of his alter ego; and the more mischievous George (Finn Faulconer), Jake (Mitchell Wray) and Michael (Jordan Cole). These four young actors (who alternate with several other boys) are superb, and prove especially beguiling when they team up as a backyard band to sing “We’re All Made of Stars.”

As things progress, Barrie starts to sense how he can craft a universal story about “a lost boy” and his nasty challenger (his producer is the model for Captain Hook), with Sylvia’s fragile life an inspiration for Tinkerbell and Wendy Darling. Meanwhile, the troupe of English actors who are to perform in Barrie’s new show (all directed into overacting in this show’s thudding send-up of the acting profession), are not happy about working in a “children’s fantasy.” Of course they will soon discover they are in an immense hit.

Set designer Scott Pask, in collaboration with projection designer Jon Driscoll, lighting designer Kenneth Posner and costume designer Suttirat Larlarb, have conjured the Edwardian era in full Technicolor. The eye candy is lovely, with a series of doors deftly deployed in the “Circus of Your Mind” sequence. But the title of that sequence hints at all that can be off-putting about this potentially appealing musical.