Zazzaro also made a line pay off in a way I’d never heard before. In Act One, her Peter told Wendy that he’d like her to come to Neverland because “You could tuck us in and make pockets for us. None of us has any pockets.” In Act Two, when singing the assets Wendy could bring to the island if they’d only accept her, she sang the lyric “Oh, what pleasure she’ll bring to us; make us pockets.” All the Lost Boys, under Joe Locarro’s sharp-eyed direction, reacted accordingly, as if pockets would make all their dreams come true.

Truth is always what we’re looking for in any art form, and Zazzaro gave the show a fascinating example of it. In the scene where Wendy has used a woman’s touch to make Lost Boys Headquarters into a charming little bungalow, she’s also cast Peter as the Father of the Brood. As always, this scene has Peter sitting in a rocking chair and reading the newspaper. “A little less noise there,” Peter bellows in a fatherly voice, getting into his role.

But he’s only fatherly for a second before the reality hits him: I’m playing a grown-up role, precisely what I promised myself I’d never do. None of this is expressed in dialogue, so Zazzaro had to make us see Peter’s reluctance. She did it brilliantly by s-l-o-w-l-y lowering the newspaper from in front of her face and letting it rest on her lap; once it was there, we could fully see the expression that proved that her second thoughts were first-rate.

Here’s an odd but valid point: Peter Pan is best-served by a theater that has no balconies. Those sitting in the orchestra won’t notice what people in the upper reaches of the family circle, mezzanine or balcony will -- that the actor playing Peter, while looking for his lost shadow, obviously HAS one because the stage lighting can’t conceal it.

Looking back on it now, how amazing that Barrie, who’d already had six plays produced before Peter Pan's 1904 debut, didn’t consider this shadow-problem while writing the script. If not then, it should have occurred to him once the play was in production at The Duke of York’s Theatre, a two-balcony house.

For that matter, Barrie didn’t even need the lost shadow as motivation for Peter’s return; the playwright had established that Peter also wanted to come back to the Darling manse to hear the final scene of Cinderella that he’d missed. Besides, isn’t a shadow a liability in Neverland? If you were pursued on a daily basis by Captain Hook, wouldn’t you be glad NOT to have a shadow, which could easily give you away when you were hiding from him? Barrie should have given a little more thought as to why Peter would want this albatross on his back, head, torso, legs, heels and, uh, gluteus maximus.

All right, all kidding aside, those who are writing their own original musicals should look carefully at the genesis of Peter Pan, for there’s a lesson to be learned here. Composer Mark Charlap and wordsmith Carolyn Leigh were originally hired to write the music and lyrics. But during the San Francisco tryout, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins felt the score needed more. Instead of entrusting Charlap and Leigh to pen new tunes, he called his On the Town collaborators Betty Comden and Adolph Green to see if they’d be interested in writing the lyrics to new songs – which they agreed to do with their Two on the Aisle collaborator Jule Styne.

At this point, Charlap and Leigh had every legal right to take their score and go home. Instead, these two Broadway rookies agreed – despite their disappointment and reluctance – to let the three far more experienced songwriters (who’d already been represented on Broadway an aggregate seven times) come in and buttress what they’d written.