Peter and the Star Catcher at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival

Or: “We Now Ask that you Imagine a Grown Cat in Flight”

The theater is one of last places where you can find magic. It’s a place where an audience’s suspension of disbelief meets the thermals of ingenuity, knowledge, and perfect faith to make impossible things take to the air. And the magic doesn’t go away just because it’s a trick: we might see the gleam of wires or the bunching of the harness but that doesn’t mean that the actor isn’t flying.

Rick Elice, adaptor of Peter and the Star Catcher (from the children’s series by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, and reincarnated from the immortal play by J.M. Berrie) understands this intimately ands script is fill with the kind of frolicsome, pun filled, extravagant storytelling that invite the collaboration between the audience’s imaginations and the artists will. So to does director Jaclyn Miller. She has taken the wonders of the high seas and the tropical isles and filled them with magic tricks, foley instruments, and puppets of all sizes. Script and staging go together in a madcap time of wonder.

It’s also very funny. Anachronisms, alliterisms, bodily functions, and gory slapstick: this play has it all. Notable are the antics of Black Stache (Joe Wegner) (a pirate captain soon to be known by another prominent physical feature) and his right hand Smee (Theo Allyn), who gyrates and whirls around the set while Wegner, much known for his improvisational streak, delights in the Pirate’s madcap villainy, adding his own garnishes of wit.

Similarly the intrepid Molly Aster (Angela Utrera) is not above a bit of horseplay. While nominally the heroine Utrera will grind unabashedly through jokes and chain herself to a bit (as when Molly speaks Norse code*). There are no wasters on this ship and all the ensemble play part in labeling out the jokes and conjuring the world. Everyone gets a chance to sparkle, especially when the Mermaids come out to play.

Benjamin Michael Hall as Boy, a miserable orphan (who by Plays End will have another appellation) brings the grounding sensation to all the nonsense. Cured up around himself, bullied by the other boys (peckish Ted (Nic Scott Hermick) and prickly Prentice (Evan Steves) Hall slowly cracks out of their shell of hopelessness, ready to dive into the rich waters of adventure unfolding like a brilliant flower.

There are so many sweet lines in the play, so many portions of fun that it can sometimes get tangled up in its own feet. But with enough jokes to please audiences of all ages, with humor for those who can clock an Ayn Rand joke to those who substitute more recent villains, that it doesn’t really matter if we pause a moment to sort out our heartstrings. We are all here for a good time and a good story, and, as a opinion twinkling light, darts around the stage in the last moment (using one of the best and simplest magics of all) actors and audience are caught up in a awe that is nothing short of wondrous.

* Not to be confused with the other kind.