Almost 40 years later, Israel has launched a revival of the Peter Pan musical, a show that brings imagination and fantasy back, close to the third anniversary of October 7.
In a country where the skies can so easily fill with missiles in such a short amount of time, it might seem impossible to think about “lost kids” flying, but that is exactly where Peter Pan’s magic begins.
“There’s something very magical in this show ... a moment away from reality, some kind of fantasy, and that’s powerful,” Linoy Cohen, who plays Tiger Lily, told The Jerusalem Report.
The three years since October 7 have been a turning point in Jewish life all over the world, but in Israel the whole population lived a common trauma, leaving scars.
In the field of the performing arts, however, those bruises were reshaped into something meaningful.
Waiting at home
In times of such uncertainty in the Middle East, when families send their fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters to fight for Israel’s safety, either on reserve duty or during regular military service, Peter Pan brings to the stage a deep reflection: how it feels for the parents who wait at home for their sons.
“Suddenly, it dawned on me that there is something to that – parents who wait for their kids to come back home, kids who don’t want to grow up,” Ofir Weil, who plays Smee, told the Report.
In the play, the children do not want to go back home, and wish to never grow up, like Peter Pan.
As the current Israeli reality includes frequent scenarios where kids need to wake up from their dreams to run into bomb shelters, the “dream of never growing up,” as Weil put it, became “a reality where beyond the joy and the laughter, we move to an underlying sadness of children who want to remain forever young.”
Healing through theatre
As a young actress who has lived the perks of being an artist during long periods of war, Meshi Kleinstein, who plays Wendy Darling, explained that part of what gave her the drive to continue acting was the fact that Israelis find in art a cure.
For the actress, playing Wendy brought waves of mixed emotions, connected to this need for healing.
“It feels like longing for something good and sweet that we’re all yearning for, especially in the last few years, a moment to put everything on pause,” she told the Report.
Kleinstein said she sees the musical as something “powerful,” a place where the public can “feel as Peter for a moment. It’s our duty to go and try to take a breath, because there’s enough hardship and pain.”
“I think that being an artist became much more of a mission than what I used to think. [...] You have to make people, even if only for a moment, breathe, to feel something that isn’t an enormous pain,” she added.
“I feel that when I go up on stage, when every actor goes up on stage, for a moment, it blows away all those negative feelings,” she said.
Almost 40 years after playing Peter Pan on stage, Hanoch Rosen returns as the play’s director, reviving the feeling of a childhood when “everything seemed possible,” he said.
Having followed the path his younger self always dreamed of, Rosen told the Report that, even if “in the end, we all grow up,” every person deserves to “feel that childhood magic again.”
By the time the magic begins, you must not forget to let your mind fly along with the boy who never wanted to grow up.■