This week we chat with Merilee E about which life lessons can be learned from the story of a story musical - Finding Neverland!

As with many a Broadway musical these days, “Finding Neverland” — which features a book by James Graham and sticky soft-pop power ballads by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy — is based on a popular film. That would be the 2004 biopic about the playwright J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, which starred Johnny Depp and for which Mr. Weinstein was an executive producer.

The stage version of “Finding Neverland” is no replica of the film, though it might have been better if it were. Instead, it heightens the screenplay’s sentimentality, tidy psychologizing and life-affirming messages by thickening their syrup and corn quotients in ways presumably deemed palatable to theatergoing children and their parents. The show brings to mind those supersize sodas sold in movie theaters, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg once quixotically campaigned against.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Neverland_(musical)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Neverland_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Knee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Frankel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Korie

https://findingneverlandthemusical.com/

https://stageagent.com/shows/musical/8899/finding-neverland

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Our theme song and interstitial music all by the one and only Benedict Braxton Smith.

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