BY TARA BURKE
A little while back Cailin and I went to the new Broadway musical “Finding Neverland.” The musical is about playwright J.M. Barrie and his real-life relationship with the family that inspired his most renown work, “Peter Pan.” This rendition stars Matthew Morrison as J.M. Barrie, Laura Michelle Kelly as Sylvia Llewelyn Davis (Wendy), and Kelsey Grammar as Charles Frohman (Hook). They are accompanied by a great cast and some very talented young actors playing the three boys Jack, George and Michael.
We loved it all around. We thought it had a good mixture of Peter Pan magic as well as a back story into the making of the original play. The sets were particularly amazing and really detailed. Critic reviews weren’t that impressed, but I’d only pay attention to the audience reviews on this one. It’s a fun show sure to please all ages and in our opinion definitely has all the Broadway bells and whistles. We stuck around after the show waiting at the theater door to get autographs from the actors, which we had never done before! It was slightly crazy, but Cailin was able to get just about everyone’s autograph on her program and we snagged a few photos.
If you’re looking for a new musical to get to this summer, this one is perfect for children and adults alike!
Castle Foundations 
I was just in NYC and I really wanted to see “Finding Neverland” on Broadway. It looked like such a fun, magical musical for all ages. But, I ended up going to “Something Rotten!” instead, which was still a great show.
If you’re ever in the city again I’d definitely recommend seeing “Finding Neverland!” We haven’t been to “Something Rotten!,” but good to hear it was a great show. We’ll have to check it out. 🙂
It’s nice that you enjoyed this! Usually, critics’ reviews are not very reliable I feel… take them with a pinch of salt. However, I have to point out that Finding Neverland falls flat in the music, and that might be why it loses in the Tony nominations this year. The score was honestly quite bad, but I am sure the performances of the cast was great. I think that did not make up for the bad music though, so the Tony panel snubbed the show altogether.
That may be the reason. It went into our top 5 Broadway show list in terms of overall enjoyment. The score didn’t get us to buy the recording right away and we weren’t humming the tunes for days after seeing the show, but we enjoyed them in the moment.