Broadway Biz and Buzz Event!

Opportunities for Broadway Theater Producing and Investing*

Speakers: Hugh Hysell (Marketing Director for over for over 200 Broadway and Off Broadway shows) and Eva Price (Producer of Annie [Fall 2012], Peter and The Starcatcher, Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony, Merchant of Venice, Colin Quinn Long Story Short, The Addams Family, Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking)

Special Guest: Tony Award nominee Rick Elice

DATE: Thurs Feb 9th, 2012

TIME: 7:00PM check-in, 7:30PM presentation

LOCATION: A lovely apartment in the Times Square Area (you must rsvp to get the address)

RSVP: http://bwaybuzzpeter.eventbrite.com/ 

You MUST RSVP to attend. Limited Space available. For Serious and Accredited investors only

Broadway hits continue to “hit” even when the market is a Bear. Learn about opportunities to be involved with the upcoming hits of this season, Peter and the Starcatcher.

Special Guests : Rick Elice (Playwright- Peter and the Starcatcher, The Addams Family and Tony Award and Drama desk Award nominee for Jersey Boys) and Eva Price (Producer of the upcoming Annie, Peter and the Starcatcher and last season's Merchant of Venice, Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony, Colin Quinn Long Story Short) sharing the story behind the buzz of what is looking to be Broadway's most thrilling blockbuster play of the 2011-2012 theater season.

An evening of information, education, Broadway buzz, and art!

• Ask “insider questions”
• Get the facts on budgeting and producing an innovative Broadway play in this day and age
• Hear about the show's origin, development, and creative process          

*For Serious and Accredited investors only. This is not a formal offering to invest. A formal offering can only be made via prospectus.

More info about PETER AND THE STARCATCHER:

Broadway's Broadway's most exciting and surprising new production since War Horse.  Written by Rick Elice and directed by  Roger Rees  and Alex Timbers,  PETER AND THE STARCATCHER upends a century-old legend with this wildly theatrical, innovative, and hilarious reboot of everyone's favorite classic story about the boy who refused to grow up-Peter Pan.   Peter and the Starcatcher  begins preview performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre March 28, with an official opening night set for April 15.   The sold-out run  played to rave reviews when it premiered  at New York Theatre Workshop last March and garnered numerous Lucille Lortel, Obie, and Drama Desk nominations.  Based on the best-selling novel by humorist Dave Barry  and Ridley Pearson, the Broadway production of Peter and the Starcatcher stars Broadway favorite and Star of the upcoming NBC television show SMASH, Christian Borle, where he leads a company of 12 actors playing 50 characters on a journey to discover the Neverland you never knew.

New York Times' RAVE Review of Peter and the Starcatcher:

Peter Pan (the Early Years), With Bounding Main and All

"All sinking sensations should feel this sensational. When the H.M.S. Neverland goes down in “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the blissful exercise in make-believe that opened on Wednesday night at the New York Theater Workshop, it’s the most enthralling shipwreck since James Cameron sent the Titanic to her watery grave in the late 1990s (and picked up a crate of Oscars).

"Mr. Cameron, of course, had digital magic, green screens, hundreds of extras and a $200 million budget at his disposal. The directors of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, have a small stage, a ladder, some rope, thunder and lightning effects that might have been in use a century ago, and a cast of exactly a dozen. Yet for my money, going down with the Neverland is a heck of a lot more fun — and ultimately more convincing — than any big-screen equivalent.

"Or any big-stage equivalent, for that matter. Adapted by Rick Elice from Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s popular children’s novel of 2004, “Peter and the Starcatcher” sustains a breathless air of adventure and a cocky confidence in its powers to enchant that elude most family oriented spectacles now on Broadway, including hits like “Wicked” and “Mary Poppins.” In relating the back story of how a sullen, skeptical orphan became the eternal boy known as Peter Pan, “Starcatcher” celebrates the leap of faith that occurs when we tell and believe improbable tales.

"It seems apt, then, that leaping should be a major physical activity in this untiringly energetic production, which follows various heroic, evil and still-undecided characters on a tempest-tossed ocean voyage from England to a mysterious island. People leap off ship decks and through ocean waves and, in one especially memorable case, from a mountaintop into a shimmering lagoon (which, for the literal-minded, means jumping off a ladder and into a silver fireman’s net).

"Such kinetic intensity is of a piece with Mr. Barry and Mr. Pearson’s original novel, a retrospective riff on J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” stories that would not seem prime material for the stage. Merging the affable, straight-faced whimsy of Dave Barry, the author and former humor columnist, with the plot-spinning skills of Mr. Pearson, a suspense novelist, the children’s book is divided into short, fast, highly eventful chapters that might translate naturally into a fantasy action movie, preferably animated.

"The stage script by Mr. Elice (“Jersey Boys,” “The Addams Family”) condenses and simplifies the novel’s multistranded plot while making more explicit reference to the Barrie prototype. It is also sillier and more sentimental, as the demands of showbiz warrant.

"And don’t think for a second that this production isn’t showbiz at its most brazenly infectious. In telling a complicated story — it involves pirates, orphans and some transformative substance that comes from fallen stars — Mr. Rees and Mr. Timbers are endlessly and flamboyantly resourceful, transforming their cast into a single, multilimbed and remarkably efficient narrative organism.

"Each director brings his own pertinent set of skills to the enterprise. Mr. Rees, you may recall, played the title character in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s fabled marathon adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” (seen on Broadway in 1981), which many theatergoers remember as the apotheosis of story theater. Like “Nickleby,” “Starcatcher” uses its cast members both to deliver a third-person narrative and to slip into different eccentric characters, who include salty sailors, helpful mermaids and a group of restless and possibly homicidal island natives.

"Mr. Timbers is the hip theater director (if that’s not an oxymoron) responsible for, among other productions, the inspired, genre-scrambling, historical bio-musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” And “Starcatcher,” like “Jackson,” walks a slippery tightrope between flippancy and highly charged sincerity without losing its balance. It also revels in the kind of antic verbal humor — tongue twisters, bad puns, fleetingly tossed-off anachronisms — that classically appeals to the arrested goofball in grown-ups as well as to children.

"On the page the script for “Starcatcher” verges on preciousness on the one hand and snarkiness on the other. But on the stage it acquires the excited, self-delighted giddiness you associate with really good yarn spinners.

"Donyale Werle’s dream box of a set is all sooty shadows in the first act and music-hall paradise sunshine in the second (with matching lighting by Jeff Croiter and witty, period-scrambling costumes by Paloma Young).

"Against this backdrop the performers keep reconfiguring themselves into various shapes that serve to evoke (quite ravishingly) the different cabins of a ship, a hungry and dynamic ocean and (with the use of foliage-shaped panels) a jungle to get lost in. (Steven Hoggett is credited with overseeing “movement,” which in this show means a lot.)

"The style of acting brings to mind the British fairy-tale Christmastime entertainments known as panto, early-20th-century vaudeville and the mildly naughty musical romps from the 1930s of Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter. (Wayne Barker wrote the music, which includes a delicious Ziegfeld-Girl-style second-act opener for the saucy mermaids.)

"The cast is, with one exception, male, and, with no exceptions, wonderful. Celia Keenan-Bolger takes on the womanly duties as Molly, a brainy and resourceful 13-year-old, embodying a proto-feminist willpower with stylish wit and ardor. She provides the sort-of love interest for the nameless, homeless boy who discovers his identity (and a name for the ages) in the course of the show. He is played by Adam Chanler-Berat (the likable stoner in “Next to Normal” on Broadway) as an every-adolescent sort of brooder that pretty much anyone who is, was or plans to be a teenager will identify with.

"But it's Christian Borle who perhaps best captures the show's knowing innocence and culture-mixing wizardry. Mr. Borle plays a pirate named Black Stache (who is poised to become that loathsome creature named Captain Hook) as a blend of Groucho Marx , Peter Allen and the ultimate Shakespearean ham.

"It's a performance that you might classify as over the top, but only in the sense that the entire production is. With grown-up theatrical savvy and a child's wonder at what it can achieve, “Peter and the Starcatcher” floats right through the ceiling of the physical limits imposed by a three-dimensional stage. While there's not a body harness in sight, like those used to hoist the title characters of “Mary Poppins” and “Spider-Man,” this show never stops flying." - Ben Brantley, New York Times

MORE PRESS…

"……. There have been some recent successful transfers, however. Another play that got its start off-Broadway, "Venus in Fur," a Manhattan Theatre Club production about an actress with a dominatrix streak, thrived in its 2011 Broadway debut and reopens in a commercial Broadway house next month. Broadway veterans have high hopes for "Peter and the Starcatcher," a Peter Pan prequel that sold out off-Broadway last year and is set to open on Broadway this spring…." -The Wall Street Journal

New York Times: ‘Peter and the Starcatcher  Will Land on Broadway in March'

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/peter-and-the-starcatcher-will-land-on-broadway-in-march/

January 19, 2012

Associated Press: ‘Prequel to  Peter Pan  finds a Broadway theater'

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hrNPTPFVoQtwFqQ4N_qRdnyAMU-w?docId=33a7530987a34a1e8c65b3430a89664f

January 19, 2012

NPR:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=145474640