Allison Williams knows you'll probably hate-tweet Peter Pan Live!. “Watch it the way you watch everything, watch it critically, do whatever you want,” she says. “But even if it’s just secretly, go along for the ride.”
Williams, who proved her Peter Pan bona fides when a photo of her in a homemade Peter costume made the nightly news, is counting on the live production to bring out the kid in everyone. “I want it to be that moment in Ratatouille where that food critic zooms back to his childhood,” she said during a press event in October, while rehearsals were in full swing. “You hear the beginning score for Peter Pan, and for me it’s such an intense sense memory. I get transported right back to sitting on the family-room floor watching it over and over and over again.”
With 21 million fellow Americans, Williams watched NBC's Sound of Music Live! last December, and calls it a “transporting, magical thing for me to watch.” Now the network is counting on the same magic—and ratings—for Peter Pan, which co-stars Christopher Walken as Captain Hook, Tony-winning Broadway (and Sound of Music Live!) veteran Christian Borle, and Tony nominee Kelli O'Hara. And if following up the ratings of a mega-hit wasn't a big enough challenge, the Peter Pan production includes numerous children, two dogs (Nana and her understudy), sword fights, and, of course, flying, which Williams says “at first feels really effortless, and you’re like, ‘It’s so fun!,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, she has no idea.’”
Everyone in the cast has their own challenges going into Peter Pan, from learning how to look convincing in a sword fight (“I always look like a coward. I’m always backing away,” says Walken) to properly handling the weapons (“I just don’t want to impale Christopher Walken,” says Borle. “That’s all of my focus right now.”) And the key to not worrying about any of it come Thursday's show, they say, is not thinking about it at all. “I'm very superstitious, so I'll just do my usual thing,” Walken said of his plans for the day of the show. What’s his usual thing? “Just not thinking about that.” Borle admitted he was surprisingly nervous before Sound of Music Live! last year, but despite years of theater training, didn't have any magical advice for being less nervous this time: “You have to shut that excitement out, and just focus on the people you’re working with, and that makes things easier.”
For Williams, she says her focus during the show will be all about one cast member in particular: John Allyn, who plays the youngest Darling child, Michael. “He’s the person for whom I need this magic to come to life,” Williams says. “I want to create a space in his heart, and in all kids’ hearts, for Peter Pan in the same way it existed when I was a kid.”
Peter Pan Live! airs at 8 P.M. Thursday on NBC.
