Tag: the little white bird

Calendar: December 27

Year: Day to Day Men; December 27

Moss Green on a Field of Blue

The 27th of December in 1904 marks the theatrical premier of James Matthew Barrie’s play “Peter Pan”, also known as “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”. The play was produced by Charles Frohman and opened at the Duke of York’s Theater in London. The lead character of Peter Pan was played by thirty-seven year old Nina Boucicault due to regulations regarding child actors. Gerald du Maurier doubled as Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. 

Peter Pan first appeared in J. M. Barrie’s 1902 novel “The Little White Bird”. This original story focused on the fictional idea that all babies where at one point birds. The inspiration for the iconic scenes of Peter Pan flying can be drawn from that idea. Peter Pan actually appeared as a minor character in a few chapters of “The Little White Bird”. 

The London play was met with positive reviews by both critics and viewers. In 1905, Frohman brought “Peter Pan” to New York where it premiered at Broadway’s Empire Theater. Maude Adams played Peter, a role she reprised in 1912 and 1915 theatrical runs. The Broadway role of Peter Pan was showcased by Marilyn Miller in 1924 and Eva Le Galliennne in 1928.

In 1906, Barrie published a second novel, entitled “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”, that expanded the character of Peter Pan through a series of adventures. Barrie continued to re-examine the character through multiple revisions of the play and, in 1911, wrote a third novel entitled “Peter and Wendy”. The story line for the novel was inspired by the revisions Barrie had made to the play. 

“Peter Pan” made its first adaption as a musical in 1950 with music and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein. The play starred Jean Arthur as Peter Pan and horror icon Boris Karloff as Captain Hook. However, after its initial run, this adaption virtually vanished until 2018 when Bard College did a contemporary take on the show.

The best known “Peter Pan” musical is the 1954 adaption with Mary Martin as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. This play, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, won Tony Awards for the lead actors. Broadway revivals starred Sandy Duncan in 1979 and ex-gymnast Cathy Rigby throughout the 1990s. In 2014, a live NBC telecast of the stage show starred Allison Williams as Peter and Christopher Walken as Captain Hook.

J. M. Barrie: “He Had Ecstacies Innumerable”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Erotic Dionysain Vision of Peter Pan), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Born in Kirriemuir, located in the council area of Angus in May of 1860, James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish playwright and novelist. The ninth of ten children of a conservative Calvinist family, he was sent at the age of eight to the Glasgow Academy where he was put in the care of his siblings Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school. Two years later, Barrie returned home and studied at the Forfar Academy and, later, at the Dumfries Academy. 

James M. Barrie enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study literature and graduated with an Masters of Arts in April of 1882. In the next decade, he wrote several short stories, which served as basis for his first novels. These were popular enough to establish Barrie as a successful writer. In 1891, Barrie wrote a successful theater play, “Ibsen’s Ghost or Tool Up-to-Date”, a parody of Henrik Ibsen’s dramas “Hedda Gabler” and “Ghosts”. 

Barrie’s character of Peter Pan first appeared in his 1902 novel “The Little White Bird”, published in book form by Hodder & Stoughton and serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. His more famous and enduring theatrical work “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” had its first stage performance on the 27th of December in 1904 at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre. The play introduced the character of Wendy and contrasted the social constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle class domestic reality with the moral ambivalence of Neverland.

In 1911, J. M. Barrie developed the “Peter Pan” play into the novel “Peter and Wendy”. Both versions tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly and has many adventures on the island of Neverland that is inhabited by fairies, mermaids, Indians, and pirates. The stories also involve the Darling children Wendy, John and Michael, the fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and the pirate Captain Hook. Barrie continued to revise the play for years after its debut; the final version was published in 1928. 

Prior to the publication of Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy”, the play was adapted into a 1907 novelization entitled “The Peter Pan Picture Book” written by Daniel O”Connor and illustrated by Alice Woodward. The original 1911 novel contains a frontispiece and eleven half-tone plates by Francis Donkin Bedford. With Barrie’s permission, the novel was first abridged by May Byron in 1915 and published under the name “Peter Pan and Wendy”; this version was later illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell in 1921. Barrie gave the copyright to the Peter Pan works in April of 1929 to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading children’s hospital in London. 

Disney was a long-time licensee to the animation rights, and cooperated with the hospital when its copyright claim was clear. After following the directive to harmonize copyright laws within the European Union in 1995, the copyright was extended to the end of 2007. The original versions of the play and novel are now in the public domain in most of the world including all countries where the term of copyright is eighty-five years or less after the death of the creators. In spite of the expiration of the copyright, a 1988 United Kingdom statutory provision grants royalties, regarding any public performance, commercial publication, and communication to the public of any substantial part of the play or adaptation of it, in perpetuity to the Great Osmond Street Hospital.

Insert Images: Francis Donkin Bedford, Illustration for “Peter and Wendy”, 1911, Hodder & Stoughton (London) and Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York)