Review: The Georgia Ballet’s new “Peter Pan” is a charming escape to Neverland

She’s a girl on the brink of adolescence. He’s a boy who’ll never grow up. Their paths cross for an adventure filled with mischief and magic.

Orchestral music lilted through Marietta’s Jennie T. Anderson Theatre last Friday evening, as beloved characters Peter Pan and Wendy Darling waltzed together, riding the rhythm as they moved like mirror images toward and away from one another. He then twirled her under his arm and steadied her waist as she perched sweetly in arabesque, recalling Michel Fokine’s Spectre de la Rose. Their relationship was not quite platonic, and not yet romantic — as J.M. Barrie wrote in his classic tale, they were “betwixt and between.”

These duets recurred throughout the Georgia Ballet’s new version of Peter Pan. Choreographed by Daet and Margit Rodriguez, the production received its premiere last weekend. Bold characters, vivid design elements and airborne dancing created an enchanting work for children or anyone who has yearned to escape the reality of growing up.

The Georgia Ballet has matured since Daet and Margit Rodriguez assumed artistic leadership in 2015 and staged their previous version of Peter Pan on the company in 2016. Now, six years later, the company has grown into a cohesive organization with deep community ties and strong dancers whose theatrical warmth often transcends their technique.

The new production uses Carmon DeLeone’s music, originally composed for John McFall’s version of Peter Pan, which Atlanta Ballet performed in 1999 at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The cinematic score features emotional, harmonic swells, thundering timpani and spritely tintinnabulations.

It propelled a fantasy seen through the eyes of Wendy Darling, performed Friday by Kelsey (Stanhope) Shackleford. From the moment she convinced Peter Pan to let her brothers tag along with them to Neverland, to her abduction to Hook’s pirate ship — and through each phase in her relationship with Peter Pan — every wisp of feeling read beautifully. Shackleford captured the young heroine’s innocence and courage with just the right amount of emotion, underscoring her gestures with heartfelt honesty and imbuing her dancing with lyricism.

Zamora, a former member of the English National Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet, upgraded the whole production. With a natural boyish grace, he wore his technical skill like a comfortable pair of jeans. He casually dashed off a series of turning leaps and sailed overhead in suspended stag leaps, his technique serving his character, which fit him like a glove — especially when he sprang into an open stance, his arms crossed and head cocked to one side with impish confidence.

As the winged fairy Tinkerbell on Friday, Talina Rodriguez appeared luminous in green, her arabesques as evanescent as a firefly’s light as she scattered fairy dust to keep the story buzzing along. In a standout airborne solo, Rodriguez told Peter how pirates had captured their friends. Hovering, she fluttered up and down, her whole body urgently speaking a quicksilver sign language.

Francisco Aguilar’s Captain Hook was more comical than Barrie’s diabolical villain. In foppish frockcoat and plumed tricorne, Hook commanded a motley crew and finally met his doom, tangoing with Amber Runyan as the lithe-limbed Crocodile.

Both Barrie and Walt Disney have been criticized for depicting the Indians in Peter Pan as offensive racial stereotypes. This production largely avoided that. Conceptually, Tiger Lilly’s band of Lost Girls exists in Tinkerbell’s fantasy realm where they appeared as regal and empowered women who rose onto pointe with arrow-straight legs and thrust their arms powerfully to their sides, evoking mythic warriors.

Apt storytelling helped form a cohesive plot, starting in the opening nursery scene. After Peter Pan danced with his shadow, three adult-sized figures appeared in black body stockings from head to toe. These shadows carried Wendy across the stage against her will, foretelling of her future abduction by pirates. Casting worked well, with Tim Kolman as the children’s father and later as Hook’s right-hand man, Smee.

These reference points were folded in with Wendy’s and Peter’s recurring waltz dances. In their final duet, Peter pointed to a distant star, but Wendy interceded, awakening both of them to the fact that they have different paths to follow.

The Georgia Ballet’s Peter Pan skirts the evil that Barrie depicted in his story, but this lighthearted telling is just right for young and old audiences who want to lose their shadows for a couple of hours of flight and fantasy.

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Cynthia Bond Perry has covered dance for ArtsATL since the website was founded in 2009. One of the most respected dance writers in the Southeast, she also contributes to Dance Magazine, Dance International and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She has an M.F.A. in narrative media writing from the University of Georgia.