Good morning. A comedy called “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” opens on Broadway tonight. We’ll ask two stars of the musical “Peter Pan” if things ever went wrong when they were onstage. We’ll also look at the fight between Mayor Eric Adams and progressive Democrats over the city budget.

Things are supposed to go wrong in “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the farcical comedy that opens tonight at the Barrymore Theater. It’s a sendup of an amateur theater company’s struggle to stage the musical about the boy who would not grow up, so the miscues, missteps and mishaps have all been carefully rehearsed. Lights are supposed to flash and flicker. Furniture is supposed to collapse. The revolving stage is supposed to spin like a 78-r.p.m. record.

Most of all, Peter Pan is not supposed to fly smoothly.

All that prompted a question: Did “Peter Pan” ever go wrong — the real “Peter Pan,” the fly-by-wire musical based on the J.M. Barrie classic?

I asked Sandy Duncan, who played Peter Pan in 554 performances on Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s, and Cathy Rigby, who starred in three Broadway revivals, starting in the 1990s. They did not say yes, but they did not say no, either.

“The show ran like clockwork,” Duncan said, except for a night when it did not.

The trouble came during the scene in which Peter is supposed to tell the children how he flies. “The little one goes, ‘Peter, how do you do it?’ and I go, ‘Well, you just think lovely thoughts and up you go,’ only I didn’t go,” Duncan said. The violins in the orchestra had been playing a sting, a one-note phrase, to build up to her takeoff. The orchestra went silent.

The orchestra started up again. Jonathan Ward, playing Michael, asked again. And again. “He kept feeding me the line,” she recalled. “No going up. Four times that happened. Finally I said, ‘Will you shut up, Jonathan.’”

She said she turned to the audience and said, “You paid a lot of money to see this show and me flying. We’re going to shut things down here and get things right.” She called for the man who controlled the wires, who walked onstage and looked up. “The wire had gotten wound around a light,” she said. “He flipped it around and unhooked it and said, ‘I think you’ll be OK.’”

The show resumed. Ward asked how she did it. She said the line about the lovely thoughts, and that time, up she went.

Rigby, who said she had played Peter more than 3,000 times, between Broadway and touring companies, remembered her last performance. One of her front teeth popped out — a temporary implant. It landed onstage. She picked it up. Moments later, “I’m flying, holding onto this tooth and thinking I’ll put it in my fairy-dust pack.”

She finished the scene without tossing the tooth across the stage when she scattered the fairy dust. Backstage, she washed the tooth, applied Krazy Glue and put it in her mouth. “It wasn’t in quite correctly,” she said, “but I got through the show.”

She also made it through a performance in Kansas City, Kan.

“I was fighting Captain Hook,” she said. “The swords we were using were not sharp, but they were metal. After I defeated him, I used my flying to get away from him.”

She was supposed to rise to the crow’s nest of the ship. On the way up, “I’m thinking to myself, we’re flying really fast.” She realized she was going to crash into the crow’s nest.

She put her arms up to soften the impact, forgetting that she was still holding the sword.

It ricocheted, slicing into her forehead and drawing blood. “I think the audience thought the blood was special effects,” she said.

She ran offstage and found a Band-Aid, which popped off during the next scene. After the curtain came down, she went to an emergency room. The next day her father called, saying he had heard that she had been stabbed on the way to the theater. “I said, no, no, no, that’s not what happened,” she said, “and I told him the whole story.”

So if things went wrong in “Peter Pan,” what has gone wrong in “Peter Pan Goes Wrong”?

“Fortunately, nothing where we had to take a time out,” said Greg Tannahill, who plays Peter. “With regard to my flying, nothing major.” He did fly into a window sill once. “I thought OK, there’s another bruise, but we’ll talk about that later,” he said, making this production sound smoother and safer than the original, which was staged 10 years ago on a far smaller budget at a theater in North London.

“I had never flown before, and the person on the ropes flying me had never done that before,” he said. “To this day I have scars on my shins from that production because every now and then, my shins would go thwack into the top of the ragged set.”

Weather

Enjoy a sunny day near the mid-60s. At night, it’s mostly clear. Temps will drop around 50.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Friday (Eid al-Fitr).

The latest Metro news

Crime

Arrest in gay bar killings and robberies: A man whom the Police Department described as a leader of a gang that perpetrated a series of robberies and killings at Manhattan gay bars has been arrested.

Murder charge: New details emerged about a man in upstate New York who was charged with murder in the shooting death of a woman in a car that mistakenly went up his driveway.

More local news

Chief judge appointee: Gov. Kathy Hochul’s newest nominee to become New York State’s top judge, Judge Rowan Wilson, was approved by the State Senate.

Breaking a 70-year anti-crime pact: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New Jersey can withdraw from a commission set up in 1953 to keep organized crime out of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

Infrastructure for delivery workers: Delivery workers have been pushing for better and more consistent pay, but the physical logistics of their work have become a new focus of both government officials and workers’ rights advocates.

A new era for 54 Below: After nearly 11 years in operation, the owners of 54 Below, one of the city’s highest-profile cabaret venues, has decided to transition from a commercial entity to a nonprofit.

Progressives and Adams at odds over the city budget

New York City’s $100 billion-plus budget is the next flashpoint in the fight between progressives and Mayor Eric Adams, who is pushing fiscal austerity to accompany his moderate politics.

The City Council’s powerful Progressive Caucus will release a list of spending priorities today that includes $4 billion for affordable housing and $315 million on providing “right to counsel” services to tenants facing evictions. The caucus’s demands are at odds with Adams’s push for fiscal austerity and will lay down the battle lines in a fight over which version of Democratic leadership will prevail in New York.

Adams recently instituted another round of budget cuts for city agencies, the third since he took office in January 2022, and readily acknowledged that city services could be affected. The Progressive Caucus is countering that Adams’s cuts are “draconian” and unnecessary — and will bring on more pain at a time when the city is increasingly unaffordable.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons, our City Hall bureau chief, writes that the fight is similar to skirmishes in other cities that are struggling with strategies to address crime, homelessness and poverty. In Chicago, Brandon Johnson, the progressive Democratic candidate for mayor, won this month on a public safety message that went beyond policing. But Adams and his top political adviser, Evan Thies, discounted the notion that the Chicago election was a sign that Democratic voters had shifted to the left and that New York could follow suit.

METROPOLITAN diary

Impromptu flea

Dear Diary:

It was fall, and I was walking from Greenpoint to Williamsburg to meet a friend for dinner. As the temperature dropped, I began to feel underdressed.

I passed McCarren Park on my way. A few vendors had set up what looked like a small, impromptu flea market.

Hanging at the far end of the last table was a stunning cropped jacket. It was unique and straight out of the ’70s, with a green-and-brown plaid print and a corduroy collar. I snatched it up.

Feeling fashionable, I arrived at the restaurant where I was meeting my friend and we got a table. A waitress came over and looked right at me.

“I love your jacket,” she said. “You just bought that today, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?!” I asked, flummoxed by both her accuracy and her certainty.

“Because I used to own it,” she said with a smile. “My boyfriend is trying to start a vintage clothing business, and I parted with some choice pieces to help get it going. Today is actually his first day selling.”

Potentially a good omen for a new business, we agreed.

— Lorena Olivas

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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