Washington Post - Recommended
"...Picture mermaids and shipwrecks, lonely orphan boys long deprived of sunlight and suddenly racing toward danger with pirates. Picture "Peter Pan": That's what the happily rambunctious "Peter and the Starcatcher," now at the Kennedy Center after capturing five Tony Awards on Broadway, entices audiences to do."
DCist - Highly Recommended
"...In Barry's Tony-winning "adult prequel" to Barrie, this show perfectly straddles the line between self-aware hamminess and genuine wonderment and joy. We know what's coming at the end, but seeing the twists and turns it takes to get there is always interesting. Clever choreography and the simple but beguiling set can convey almost anything - singing mermaids, shipwrecks, shark attacks - without the help of cheesy flying harnesses (sorry, Mary Martin)."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...Everything registers in Peter and the Starcatcher, a play so dependent on precise ensemble work that you'll wonder whether those are actors or a troupe of acrobats flinging themselves about the Eisenhower Theater stage. A dozen bodies, a stretch of rope, the occasional box or bowl or trunk or ladder-that's roughly all it takes for the Starcatcher cast and movement coordinator Steven Hoggett to create everything from ships' cabins to bilges to island lagoons to crocodiles. It's all found-object theatrical magic, the simplest of props plus the limitless power of enthusiastic suggestion, and it's never not in frenetic motion. If this ripsnorter of a whimsical comedy were a body part, it would have to be jazz hands."
Washingtonian - Highly Recommended
"...Peter and the Starcatcher is not a musical, but rather a play with music. Its rich, often rhymed dialogue bristles with droll anachronistic puns. A pair of live musicians (music director and keyboardist Andy Grobengieser and percussionist Jeremy Lowe) perch on high platforms at either side of the stage to play the score, accompany the few songs, and provide background music and sound effects. (One must also point out the delicious frat-boys-in-drag kick line of mermaids that opens act two. Just any old fish in the sea, they were, until an encounter with magical "star stuff" transformed them.)"
MD Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...It's clear from the touring production how Peter and the Starcatcher won its Tonys for Donyale Werle's scenic design, Paloma Young's costume design, Jeff Croiter's lighting design and Darron West's sound design. It is so exactingly directed that it's no wonder it took two in that role, Roger Rees and Alex Timbers."
DCTheatreScene - Highly Recommended
A sequence in which the backs of the ensemble become a series of doors through which Molly observes the below-deck goings-on, another sequence during which the ship is distressed while at sea, a simply done but magical levitation effect, a boy-overboard sequence.
