Onstage at Dobama Theater now through Saturday, December 31st in Cleveland Heights is the return of last season's acclaimed holiday production - Peter and The Starcatcher - a prequel to J.M. Barrie's beloved children's tale - Peter Pan. Back in 2012, the original Broadway production won 5 Tony awards.
Last year Dobama Theater staged its own rendition of the play, which is based on the bestselling books by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. During the show's first run, ideastream's Dee Perry welcomed Dobama's artistic director Nathan Motta to share a preview of the production, and he brought along two of the show's stars - actors: Christopher Bohan and Andrew Gorell.
Perry asked Motta why the original production became so popular on Broadway.
Motta: I think for most of us in the theater, whether you're in college or grad school or in much smaller venues, you do a lot workshop productions where you're using some black blocks and a piece of fabric and you're doing a lot of storytelling theater where you're creating it from whole cloth or found objects. Typically on Broadway you have a lot more money than that and a bigger budget. What "Peter and the Starcatcher" did was bring that storytelling theater back to Broadway, back to the mainstream, after a really successful run at the New York Theater Workshop (which is a smaller venue compared to Broadway houses) and people just connected with it.
I will say that it's really fun, for the first blocking rehearsals, to bring in all the "ingredients" in terms of props and all the toys they get to play with, and seeing how many different ways we can use them and how the actors interacted with them and the choices they made. The first day we stepped on set you would've thought we bought the cast a new jungle gym. Everyone was on it figuring out how things work, bouncing around and interacting.
Hear the interview with Nathan Motta on 90.3 WCPN Friday, December 2 at 1:33pm during Here and Now featuring The Sound of Applause.
Nathan Motta, director
Christopher Bohan, actor
Andrew Gorell, actor
