Peter and the Starcatcher: This Year’s Junior Play

Each winter, RL’s youngest, budding actors and crew—from Class VI through Class IV—come together with their girls’ school counterparts for the production of the annual Junior Play. On March 1, Peter and the Starcatcher opened with magic and adventure, and with much laughter from a delighted audience. Director Paul Valley described the play as not Disney’s Peter Pan, but as the prequel: “In this superhero origin story,” Mr. Valley said, “we’ll learn how Peter Pan got his powers—how he learned to fly.”

Playwright Rick Elice sets the scene of the Tony Award-winning play: “A young orphan and his mates are shipped off from Victorian England to a distant island ruled by the evil King Zarboff. They know nothing of the mysterious trunk in the captain’s cabin, which contains a precious, otherworldly cargo. At sea the boys are discovered by a precocious young girl named Molly, a Starcatcher-in-training who realizes that the trunk’s precious cargo is starstuff, a celestial substance so powerful that it must never fall into the wrong hands. When the ship is taken over by pirates—led by the fearsome Black Stache, a villain determined to claim the trunk and its treasure for his own—the journey quickly becomes a thrilling adventure.

Peter and the Starcatcher upends the century-old story of how a miserable orphan comes to be The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (or, Peter Pan). An adaptation of Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s best-selling novel, the play was conceived for the stage by directors Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, and written by Rick Elice, with music by Wayne Barker. From marauding pirates and island tyrants, to unwilling comrades and unlikely heroes, this play playfully explores the depths of greed and despair, and the bonds of friendship, duty, and love.”

View photos of the production. (Photos by Mike Pojman)