Before J.M. Barrie sent Peter Pan flying off to Neverland, he deposited him in Kensington Gardens. The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was a confused 7-day-old infant when Barrie first imagined him, in his 1902 novel “The Little White Bird.” Peter’s favorite moment was “Lock-Out Time,” when the gates closed, fairies flew, and Barrie’s particularly fevered brand of magic could begin.
But these days, the former private gardens of Kensington Palace are part of London’s famously staid Royal Parks system. Kensington Gardens is known for formal avenues of trees and ornamental flower beds. It is not known for live events in tents. But in the summer of 2009, a tent did indeed sprout: a white-capped marquee capable of seating some 1,300 people, replete with outdoor cabanas where one could sip Pimm’s or Champagne. It looked like the setup for a royal garden party. Or maybe a wedding.
On one cool, September evening that year, a visitor headed into the tent found a full house and a hefty array of technical equipment, including sophisticated projectors capable of creating 360-degree images. This was the show’s signature — a computer-generated cyclorama designed to blur the distinction between theater and cinematic special effects and allow audience members to feel the same sensation of flying — straight on until morning — as Tinker Bell, Wendy Darling and Peter Pan.
More than anyone, said Charlie Burnell, whose company Three Sixty Entertainment, pitched this idea, it was Peter Pan who coaxed the Royal Parks to offer up their hallowed grass. Peter Pan is a favored son: a statue erected in his honor sat just a few hundred feet from the doorway to the tent. “We were the first to be able to use Kensington Gardens,” Burnell said, in a recent phone interview from London, “and we were very fortunate.”
But “Peter Pan,” despite residing in the public domain, is an international brand. And thus the same 70,000-square-foot tent that sat in Kensington Gardens now sits on the decidedly more prosaic grounds of Chicago’s Freedom Center, the West Town printing plant owned and operated by Tribune Co., the publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
For Tribune Co., a partner in this production with an economic interest in its success (Broadway in Chicago is providing marketing and other presentational support), the hosting of “Peter Pan” is part of the Tribune Co.’s strategy of producing live events with the capacity to generate revenue from such previously fallow turf as the Freedom Center parking lot (this is an initiative separate and distinct from the Chicago Tribune’s program of editorial events).
For Burnell and his U.S.-based partner, Robert Butters, this is the first in what the company hopes will be series of touring tented entertainments, aimed squarely at the family market.
“We want to tell great stories in a contemporary way — to merge elements of theater and film to make an entire experience,” the enthusiastic Butters said in an interview, laying out his multiyear proposal. “With a tent, you can control the entire world. You can’t create a truly environmental experience and then put that show in a traditional theater.” Burnell also notes that tents make it easy to create shows in the round, which means you can “keep a large audience close.”
“Peter Pan,” which Burnell said cost $5 million to initially produce, is by no means the first show in Chicago to be performed in a tent. The Cirque du Soleil has pitched its grand chapiteau for many years in the parking lot of the United Center. A massive equine entertainment, “Cavalia,” erected a 2,000-seat tent in 2009 in the West Loop to mixed success. One of the perennial predicaments in this industry is finding the right locale.
Cirque lost a prime spot by the old North Pier when the land was redeveloped. “Cavalia” wanted, but could not secure, a spot near Michigan Avenue. In 2009, Butters and Burnell, attracted to Chicago’s increasingly global reputation as a theater capital, started discussions about pitching the tent by Millennium Park (the closest Chicago equivalent to Kensington Gardens). In that scenario, “Peter Pan” would have made its U.S. premiere in Chicago in 2010. But the plan was scuppered by a scheduled replacement of the roof of the Millennium Park parking garage (“something that never actually happened,” Butters said, dryly) and “Peter Pan” premiered in San Francisco instead. The show has since played in Orange County, Calif., and Atlanta.
But Butters, who conceived several of the famous birthday parties of Tribune Co. Chairman Sam Zell, started thinking about other spots. Tribune Co., where Butters had many contacts through other entrepreneurial projects, already had held a tented haunted house on its Freedom Center campus and had been aggressive pursuing producers of live events. Thus a new plan emerged.
“We think we have a huge opportunity with this location,” said Haley Carlson, Tribune events and sponsorship manager. “Freedom Center is surrounded by a lot of new restaurants and other developments. We want to develop this into a destination for live entertainment.”
Unlike the haunted houses and a few other music-oriented Freedom Center events, which were located to the south of the property in what Carlson sees as an edgier locale (near train tracks and viaducts), the location of the “Peter Pan” tent is on the far more developed northeastern end of the Freedom Center property — in a former parking lot, where the lease with a contracted operator recently expired — and thus is close to the newly vibrant area around the former Montgomery Ward building (now the home of Groupon, among others).
On a nice night, it should be viable for audience members to walk down Chicago Avenue to the location by the river. As in London, the tent will be surrounded by places to sit, and audiences will be able to make purchases from the extensive concession area. The show has proved popular elsewhere: Butters said 130,000 saw the show in San Francisco and a further 110,000 in Orange County, despite mixed reviews. Many of those audience members, he said, were seeing “Peter Pan” for the first time.
Butters argues that the show actually can help transform, or brand, the places it plays. “We had a waterlogged, derelict park in San Francisco,” he said. “We cleaned it up. We filled it with people. It’s no longer the same.”
Freedom Center is hardly derelict, but Carlson concedes it could certainly use some further branding as a venue for upmarket live entertainment. With that in mind, Butters and Carlson said they are planning to reopen the long-closed boat dock on the adjacent Chicago River (Carlson said Tribune Co. is cutting a new boat slip and landscaping the area), and has made a deal with a local operator to offer pirate-themed cruises that will end at the show.
The Three Sixty production uses a fairly standard adaptation of the Barrie text by Tanya Ronder (this is the play, not the musical), and the cast (which is not affiliated with the Actors Equity union) is mostly British, although some Chicago actors have been hired. Butters allows that response to the show from critics has been mixed — there was some resistance in London to the focus on virtual spectacle — but he suggested that the inveterate theatergoer is not his prime market and said improvements are constantly being made. “‘Peter Pan,'” he said, “is all about families.”
There are no plans to take “Peter Pan” to New York, Butters said, but there are plans to bring other big family entertainments to Chicago and other major cities. In tents.
Carlson said that people have asked why Tribune Co. doesn’t keep a tent on the site year-round. “So,” she said, “we are talking to local theater companies and other artistic organizations.” But if all goes well, and early ticket sales are strong, Peter and Wendy should be there all summer. With more Three Sixty shows to follow.
“There currently is no touring circuit for what we want to achieve,” Butters said. “I think ‘Spider-Man’ should have been done in a tent.”
“Peter Pan” is in previews and opens Wednesday. For ticket information, go to broadwayinchicago.com.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
