Finding Neverland

Finding Neverland follows a playwright out of a run of failures and into a chance meeting with a widow and her four sons, an encounter that hands him the material for the most famous children's play ever written. The musical is about where Peter Pan came from, and what it cost the family it was taken from.

Barrie is stuck. His marriage is formal and empty, his latest play has died on its feet, and his producer wants another drawing-room comedy. In a park he meets the Llewelyn Davies boys and starts inventing games with them. One of them, still grieving his father, refuses to play along. The inventions turn into a play about a boy who will not grow up that nobody wants to stage, while the family's own losses keep surfacing underneath it.

The book is by James Graham, with music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy. It is adapted from the 2004 film and, behind that, from Allan Knee's play about Barrie. The first major stage production opened in 2015 and it has been produced widely since.

It is sentimental and perfectly aware of it, and the strongest moments are the ones that push back: the boy who refuses to pretend, the mother who sees her situation more clearly than anyone around her, and the adult recognition that imagination is a way of carrying grief rather than escaping it.

It works for families with children old enough for the sad parts, and for adults who arrive for the songs and get caught by the story instead. Live, the transformations do something no screen can, because the trick is being performed in the same room.