Murder in the Reading Room by Ellery Adams

“It wasn’t in quite correctly,” she said, “but I got through the show.” Backstage, she washed the tooth, applied Krazy Glue and put it in her mouth. She finished the scene without tossing the tooth across the stage when she scattered the fairy dust. Moments later, “I’m flying, holding onto this tooth and thinking I’ll put it in my fairy-dust pack.” One of her front teeth popped out - a temporary implant.

Rigby, who said she had played Peter more than 3,000 times, between Broadway and touring companies, remembered her last performance. She said the line about the lovely thoughts, and that time, up she went. “He flipped it around and unhooked it and said, ‘I think you’ll be OK.’” “The wire had gotten wound around a light,” she said. 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. She said she turned to the audience and said, “You paid a lot of money to see this show and me flying. Finally I said, ‘Will you shut up, Jonathan.’” “He kept feeding me the line,” she recalled. Jonathan Ward, playing Michael, asked again. The violins in the orchestra had been playing a sting, a one-note phrase, to build up to her takeoff. “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 trouble came during the scene in which Peter is supposed to tell the children how he flies. “The show ran like clockwork,” Duncan said, except for a night when it did not. They did not say yes, but they did not say no, either. 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.

Murder in the Reading Room by Ellery Adams