"Peter and the Starcatcher" creates magic in the theater

Each scene in “Peter and the Starcatcher” morphs into the next with a rapid pace and boundless imagination, making it a delight to watch.

The national tour of the Tony Award-winning play opened Tuesday at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh and runs through Sunday (go to trustarts.org for times and ticket info).

The play, a prequel to the Peter Pan story, has a physical, farcical nature that requires perfect timing. Fortunately, the cast seems to thrive on the challenge.

The 12 actors play a total of about 100 characters, switching roles with precision. Sometimes they even become the scenery.

A pirate tale with a Dickensian spirit, the action begins at a port in Victorian England.

True to its era, the play has an actors-do-it-all ethos.

Most or all of the actors are on stage the entire length of the play, and those who aren’t are always getting ready to bound on it. It’s old-school theater, exuberant and brisk.

Sound effects and a minimal bag of props are all that are used to set each scene. A length of rope becomes the choppy surface of the sea, then a staircase, then a doorway. In one scene, the actors themselves become doors that reveal raucous action when opened.

As a result, the play has a magic to it that grows in the minds of the folks in the audience.

The first act largely takes place aboard two ships (the Neverland and the Wasp), while the second unfolds on a remote island where the Peter Pan legend is born.

A hysterical mermaid musical number at the start of Act 2 sets the tone for the zaniness to follow. The sharp British wit soars to Monty Python levels, with the occasional fourth-wall-breaking modern reference tossed in (“Can you hear me now?”).

Black Stache, the evil but silly pirate captain, commandeers the second act.

The role is played with panache by John Sanders, who is brilliantly hysterical. He mixes in equal parts of Capt. Jack Sparrow, John Cleese and Groucho Marx.

“Peter and the Starcatcher” has a local connection in Boardman native Shawn Pennington, who is the production stage manager.

Pennington moved to Arizona with his family when he was just 10, where he performed in theater through high school and college. After moving to New York in 1998, Pennington spent five years as an actor.

In 2003, while in the cast of the national tour of “Fame: the Musical,” producers asked him to learn to “call” the show in case the stage manger became ill.

“It was something I had never even considered up to that point, but after trying it, I was hooked,” he said. “I always likened the job to a cross between orchestral conducting and air-traffic control.”

That description must be doubly true for the madcap “Peter and the Starcatcher.”

Before landing his current job, Pennington was the stage manager of the national tour of “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” “Man of La Mancha,” “Gypsy” and “Fame.” He also worked on “Sondheim on Sondheim,” “Next to Normal” and the Broadway company of “Wicked.”

Pennington said “Peter and the Starcatcher” is one of the most magical pieces of theater he’s ever seen.

“I am a huge fan of ‘Wicked’,” he said, “but it is a technological monster, with tons of automation and dazzling special effects. ‘Peter’ is the opposite of that. All of the magic is created with simple, everyday objects, the actors’ bodies and the audience’s imagination.

“The scenery, lighting, sound and costume designers, all of whom won Tony Awards for their efforts, have created incredible complexity out of what appears, at first glance, to be minimalism.”

Because each actor in “Peter” is a keystone that the others must totally depend upon, there can be no weak link on stage.

Toward that end, the play has four offstage understudies who each cover four or five roles and must stay sharp. “Needless to say, we spend a lot of time in understudy rehearsal,” said Pennington.