The kid spirit in putting together "Peter and the Starcatcher" was not unlike the gang of Lost Boys that are featured in this playful prequel to "Peter Pan."The process, which started seven years ago with casual discussions, eventually turned into a series of imaginative and free-wheeling development stages that would result in an off-Broadway production that quickly transferred in 2012 to Broadway, where it won five Tony Awards.The fanciful show, whose national tour comes to Hartford's Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts Feb. 18 to 23, is based on the children's book written by humorist Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Group, thought there may be a stage show based on the book and assembled a creative team to, in essence, play around with that idea of a stripped-down, no-frills, story-theater version of the tale of the boy who won't grow up, his orphaned buddies and the young girl who changes his life.One of the team members was co-director Roger Rees, actor, director and former artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival who knew something about a lean theater narrative having starred in the legendary production of 1981's "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby."

To co-direct with Rees, Schumacher asked Alex Timbers, a graduate of Yale, who was just then becoming known for his puckish off and off-off-Broadway shows such as "Guttenberg! The Musical," "Heddatron" and "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant.""I think what's great about the making of ['Peter and the Starcatcher'] is the collision of different points of view," says Timbers, also mentioning writer Rick Elice and movement director Steven Hoggett among the show's collaborators."We had the most wonderful time working on it," says Timbers during an interview from a rehearsal studio in New York where he is directing the new Broadway musical "Rocky," based on the Oscar-winning film.Though in his mid-30s, Timbers can still strike one as a tall, thin, long-haired kid, more likely to assist rather than lead such a high-profile, multimillion dollar production. But looks can be deceiving and as he effortlessly glides between ageless adult and clever kid. It soon becomes clear in conversation that he is a man in charge — but in a collaborative spirit.

Loose CollaborationThat's how he liked to work whether it's a low-budget downtown production or one set for the Winter Garden stage. The early development of 'Starcatcher," he says, is the perfect example, he says. It was a collaboration filled with a lot of, "Yes, let's do that!" among his creative colleagues."When we went to Williamstown [Mass. in the Berkshires] to first work on it, we got a bunch of non-Equity kids, grabbed about 15 props and just started making sequences," says Timbers. roxanne curtains east ham"By the end of that summer we had staged the beginning of the show, the scene in which Peter is thrown overboard and the ending where Peter 'flies' by climbing over people."the tortilla curtain characterizationSo in this open environment who decides what?"whiteheads mozart teal curtains

It just emerges through the consensus of the best ideas, he says."I don't think you can get precious with ownership over ideas like direction and writing and things like that when you're in the rehearsal room," he says, adding that in many of his shows he hired actors who were also directors and writers because they brought so many of points of view to the creative process. "They all contributed to what the script ended up being. manhattan curtains dunelmThe key is to keep that spirit so the material feel so incredibly organic."royal velvet plaza grommet top draperySince he was tapped for "Peter," Timbers went on to do other youth-friendly projects. the tortilla curtain audiobook downloadIn 2010 he directed two Broadway productions: "The Pee-wee Herman Show" and the wildly eclectic "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson."

Recent projects include the audience-immersive off-Broadway musical "Here Lies Love" with music by David Byrne about Imelda Marcos, a developmental project with The Muppets and "Rocky," now in previews and opening March 13.Yale RootsThe Manhattan-raised Timbers, the only child of a father "in investments and a mother who worked at Sotheby's," went to Yale as a film and theater double major. He headed the undergrad theater group, The Dramat, doing off-beat and experimental productions such as his "Brechtian and subversive" version of the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," which had all the secretaries pregnant and had the chairman of the board torn apart at the end.But he was also interested in producing, too. After he graduated in 2001, he decided to be an intern to artistic director Lynn Meadow at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, getting a behind-the-scenes view on how a wide variety of shows are produced on Broadway and off. Two Things That Make A Vehicle Whistle While It WorksConsumer Reports: Benjamin Moore Best Paint, Behr Best ValueNo Need To Sand When Painting Stained WoodAuriemma Turns To Knicks To Pick Up PointersWitnesses Detail Tense Scenes At Bank, Home As Cheshire Trial OpensVet At Center Of Newington No-Smoking Conflict Dies

Shop new silhouettes and colors you can mix and match. Order one size on top, another on bottom if you want. Try it on at home. If you don’t love it, send it back. Even after a trip to the beach. BEST ON THE BEACH SINCE 1963 EXPLORE THE SWIM FINDER Frost & Shelley Awards The Poetry of Song PSA Award Winning Books Cooking with the Muse In Their Own Words Luke Bloomfield on "White Sky" The curtains above the bed have balloons with snippets of the alphabet on them. The headboard is cheap bent metal with a laminated boogie-board strapped in the middle. The bed itself is just a frame, wooden board, Japanese sleeping mat. The view on a clear day is of the northern mountains. The view on a white day is of a fluke-severed whale tale. White canvases lie around the spare room like bored courtesans. The farm in the media kingdom where the television once reigned: The Age of Repressed The small pink bamboo towel has arrived.

Tomorrow or the next day there will be a jailbreak. Across the garden a man in a blue jumpsuit sits in a small dark room periodically shutting off the internet. Alternative title to this poem: Karaoke Fever. Plates of fruit carved to look like tropical feathers sit in nests of dry ice. We arrange ourselves on tiny plastic stools in the cold pulling cartilage into our mouths with our teeth. We pound our exercises out on chipped tiles. We synchronize with hundreds of others. We self-flagellate and measure our smacks. Our inner fire is literal. We tame it with pinches and pills made out of plants. You say it like this wahng-jing. Take me to wahng-jing, you must! I got obsessed with China. I used to live in Beijing, population 21 million. When I arrived I didn't speak Chinese, didn't understand it, and the city was alarmingly, indigestibly verbal. If not for a small group of expats who welcomed me into their world and gave me some sense of regularity I wouldn't have lasted long.

I committed myself to a rigorous study of Mandarin to establish a foothold on my surroundings. Many foreigners come to Beijing to do business in English. They live in huge expat enclaves with Starbucks and Subway, pesto, western toilets, access to all the English anyone needs. I lived in an old part of the city, all-native, no English. In the beginning most days I fought off nervous breakdowns. I couldn't tolerate being dumb to the details of daily life. The details were infinite and I was an infant bewildered and drawn to everything. Why was every atm machine on my block out of cash by the end of the first day of every month?[1] Why did there appear overnight the ashy remnants of tiny fires dotting the sidewalks?[2] What do you do when your colleague is catatonically wasted before the sun has set?[3] I gradually acquired language and knowledge. The layers peeled away, piece by piece bringing coherence to my infancy. But my frustration to comprehend never lifted. The more I learned the more convoluted everything became.

The more truths untangled the greater the entanglement. Does knowledge beget clarity, really? My knowledge only revealed the monumental complexity and inherent LACK of clarity that defines modern China from an uninitiated Westerner's perspective. Immense cognitive disturbances assaulted my ability to function like a normal person. One time an atm swallowed my debit card. Cash gets you food in China not credit cards. With help I learned there was a number on the machine to call. I was directed to an indeterminate space where my card had been brought for keeping. The whole affair was confusing, stressful, vaguely humiliating. From that experience and many others I learned that in order to get along I needed to pay more attention. This called for a new kind of discipline (ocd) I was not accustomed to exerting on myself. My ocd manifested in small tasks, like preparing food, which I chopped and ordered according to color and size. Mise-en-place became my coping mechanism. A notion of precision crept into my poetry.

For over a year I fed my poems with a persnickety attitude for tighter lines and crisper images. I wrote the poem "White Sky" after moving to a new district called Wangjing, which was farther from the center of the city and the small community in which I had become comfortable. I was deeply lonely, isolations mounted on isolations; the distance from friends and the places that had become familiar to me compounded with the constant struggle with language and culture, solitude from living as far as possible from my original home in western Massachusetts, rejection after breaking up with my girlfriend of six years, and the ultimate, universal isolation of human existence that I hide from / confront by writing poetry. In this solitude I turned to my appropriation of precision, a translation of my need for greater control in life. There's a poem in Michael Earl Craig's new book Talkativeness called "Sleepwalking Through The Mekong" that first appeared in his FHP chapbook Jombang Jet, a copy of which I smuggled back to China after a brief visit to the U.S.

I have my hands out in front of me. I'm lightly patting down everythingI somehow know the beef dumpling when I touch it. I can see myself from above. As if on a video monitor. I travel slowly down every alley, across every rice paddy, into and through every bedroom, into and through every closet. I am asleep and yet I am polite. I haven't asked MEC if he's travelled through Asia (I don't think it particularly matters for the poem to work), but the accuracy with which he captures the experience of moving through a strange world resonated uncannily for me at the time, and still does. Whenever I stepped outside, walked into a restaurant, etc. I became hyper-self-conscious, as if I had stumbled into a place I didn't belong, which was kind of true—I didn't belong in China. This is not to say anyone paid me any attention. A white guy in Beijing is not unique. Nonetheless I felt conspicuous. There was me, and there was the teeming them with a void between us.

The themes in "White Sky" are very straight-forward "China" themes: pollution, weird architecture ("whale tale"), technology, censorship, etc. I wanted to present them with a cultivated precision while conveying the disjointedness with which I experienced them. "Mitigated by man's savage toddlerhood" is a reference to my experience working in a bilingual preschool. The kids at this school were the only good things in my life. And as "things" they amazed and entertained me. I found the casual brutality tiny people inflict on each other to be really endearing. Each day I counted on their teeth and nails to draw me away from self-pity. The last thing I'll say about this poem is that grilled cartilage on little wooden skewers is common street-food, but that doesn't mean it's edible. [1] Everyone pays rent in cash. [2] People burn fake money for their ancestors. [3] Sit on the curb and play Angry Birds on your phone while your colleague naps in your lap. Continue browsing In Their Own Words