Their Peter and the Starcatcher, a prequel to Peter Pan based on the 2004 children's novel by Dave Barry (yes, that Dave Barry) and Ridley Pearson, is a cleverly mounted, humorously written and exuberantly performed tale of how a now well-known orphan boy met a girl, gained special powers, learned to fly and became a legend. It is being staged without any high-tech gimmickry, with no injured performers and on a budget that presumably wouldn't cover Spider-Man's physical-therapy bills. When this hero takes flight, he's simply lifted by the rest of the cast.

Mr. Elice's script has its problems, but they're nothing compared to those facing the arthropod uptown. Here, it's the first act that's a bit troubled, taking a while to untangle itself and get moving. (Cleverness, like accents, can be tough to decipher until you're acclimated; cleverness plus accents even more so.)

But it quickly develops into something straightforward: Two boats leave a Victorian and Dickensian England bound for the remote, tropical kingdom of Rundoon. One carries a nobleman guarding an important shipment; the other carries three orphans to be sold into slavery there (and also the nobleman's precocious daughter and her beloved, blowsy nanny). There be pirates, a shipwreck, a marauding crocodile and a swallowed kitchen timer, and a magical substance that just might make a boy fly. By the ending, that orphan boy has been dubbed Peter Pan, his friends have become the lost boys and the pirate captain has lost his hand. Over to you, J.M. Barrie.

In broad outline, Peter and the Starcatcher is an obvious descendent of Wicked, that great and powerful cash cow of a Wizard of Oz prequel. But while Wicked is a predictably over-the-top Mackintosh-style production whose best attribute is its unexpectedly rich script--forget the squealing bubblegum tweens for a moment and remember that it's actually a subversive argument against prom queen Glinda--Peter's story is its least interesting attribute, with the resolution of each plot development telegraphed from its first appearance. A charismatic orphan? He'll be Peter. A pirate who hates him? We're waiting for him to lose his hand. A ship named the Neverland? Of course.

But who cares if the story is obvious when the storytelling is this spectacular? Mr. Rees and Mr. Timbers have created a theatrical world that's so high-spirited, so inventive, so smart--Mr. Elice, who is Mr. Rees' partner and who wrote the book for Jersey Boys and cowrote The Addams Family, loads this simple tale with innumerable gags, puns, one-liners and loads of alliteration--that the play's plot is almost irrelevant.

Mr. Timbers (full disclosure: He's a friendly acquaintance) wrote and directed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and there's a similar knowingly smartass rambunctiousness to this production, full of meta-theatrical commentary and cheerfully mugging actors, all placed within the charmingly ramshackle sets by Donyale Werle. (What appears to be carved woodworking on the Victorian-style proscenium built for the production is on closer inspection plastic forks and what I'm pretty sure are coffee-cup lids glued to the arch.) It all has a cheerful, let's-put-on-a-show affect--no doubt a diligently and artfully manufactured one--that brings the audience in on the fun.

The immensely likable and talented cast contributes to the general air of happy good cheer. Adam Chanler-Berat, broodingly heroic as the stoner boyfriend in Next to Normal, this time wears his brooding heroism more lightly but no less convincingly as the boy who would be Pan. Christian Borle, last seen as Prior Walter in Angels in America, slowly dying of AIDS, is here the live-wire Black Stache, the pirate who'll become Hook. His over-the-top enthusiasm is the perfect engine for this over-the-top production.

Unlike Bloody Bloody (and Wicked and the Broadway version of Peter Pan), Peter and the Starcatcher is not a musical, but it does have some songs, written by Marco Paguia. There's also some dancing, some fighting, some drag and a bit of Black Watch-style theatrical acrobatics.

There's a lot going on, but still, Peter and the Starcatcher is at its heart a little show, in a little space. It knows what it is, and it's doing all those little things in the best ways. It's goofy, it's immature--it won't grow up!--and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

editorial@observer.com

And those are just the musicals.

Brooklyn-born, Mr. Greif has directed Rent, Grey Gardens and Next to Normal on Broadway, to considerable acclaim--Tony nominations for each--and, in the case of Rent, a robust 13-year run. He's also the director of the current revival at the Signature Theater of Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America, And now Mr. Greif is staging Mr. Kushner's newest play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. Performances begin March 22, and it's set to run through June 12 at the Public Theater.

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide treats a dark subject, too--it concerns a retired longshoreman in Brooklyn, Gus Marcantonio, who asks his three children, an academic, a labor lawyer and a laborer, and his sister, a nun, to come home (some of their partners in tow) to discuss his decision to end his life. One suicide attempt, in the brownstone's upstairs bath, has already gone awry.

The family fights and roars, negotiates and accuses; all their skeletons, and some cast members, come out of the closet. Suicide is a major theme in the timely show, but so is the sorry state of America, the prospects for continuing social revolution, the institution of marriage, the allure of prostitution, parenthood, sex, the real estate bubble and more.

But Mr. Greif stressed that, as with all of Mr. Kushner's work, it's not gloom and doom. "There's a lot of humor, dark humor, gallows humor, surrounding the subject." It's not a "morose or somber" play. It's also a play that's very much in the American realist tradition, he said, referencing Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets and other great dramatists. (The show's title is a riff on George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and the main character dubs himself a communist.)

"While this is an extremely dark subject matter, there's an extraordinary vitality in these characters," he said. "They're exceedingly intelligent, very articulate, and they take big issues on, throughout the play. So there's a real life force here, certainly foremost in the man who's considering ending his life ... and in that negotiation with his family."

He compared the show in some aspects to Grey Gardens, the musical about the lives of the troubled mother and daughter (and Jacqueline Onassis relatives) Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale ("Big Edie") and Edith Bouvier Beale ("Little Edie"). "Edie's life force is perhaps askew, but what makes her so extraordinarily appealing is that optimism, or that incredible survivor's instinct," Mr. Greif said. "We see her knocked down in that musical, and it's tremendously moving; it's so out of character. It's that intensity, that vitality, that struggle, that excitement, that hunger these plays and musicals all share."

The play premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the spring of 2009 but is far from set in stone. "We're still getting new pages and changes as we go into our fifth week of rehearsal," said the director. "It's undergoing a real refining process. Tony keeps writing. It's both clarifying, in this draft, [what] didn't quite land before, both in terms of what things mean and how things feel. Some things land with a little more clarity and effect in this draft." Most of the cast is also new in the Public Theater production.

By and large, reviews in Minneapolis were positive. Variety said: "The resulting three-act drama is a success--sprawling, yearning, at times emotionally violent, it is also packed with a level of complexity, sophistication and understanding that distinguishes it as a potentially important new American work." But the show, performed with two intermissions, is still running at about two hours and 40 minutes.

Mr. Greif first came to widespread attention, on this coast at least (he ran the respected La Jolla Playhouse in California for much of the 1990s), with his 1996 production of Rent, a musical that dealt with a variety of struggles among young New Yorkers. A loose adaptation of La Bohème, set in New York among young bohemians, it takes place in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. The show's creator, Jonathan Larson, died just before the premiere Off Broadway, and didn't see what a success the influential show was to become.

His unexpected passing focused attention on the production and "gave us all a real sense of purpose, and joy, in being able to keep his voice alive."

Mr. Greif added: "It was almost unthinkable that Jonathan couldn't share that moment--and see the effect that his work was having on the world. Jonathan wrote the piece in honor of friends of his who were struggling with their own mortality issues, circling with their H.I.V. status at a time when it was merely a death sentence. The irony is in the confluences; they mounted up in tragic ways."

All the works he's directed have something in common, Mr. Greif noted. "I'm drawn to material with theatrical challenges, whether that means we move from reality to fantasy like we do in Angels in America, or a play like this play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide, which shifts gears and turns so quickly and excitingly."

Just as he's aware of the specific dramatic sense that he wants to find in a musical--treating songs as soliloquies, for example, or duets as scenes--he's aware of the musicality in plays, too. "Certainly, Tony's language is almost written as a score," Mr. Greif said. "The language is very specifically written, and it's important to follow the specifics of his language. It's very telling--in the same way that musical notes can be telling in terms of emotional states. A very thorough investigation and a very thorough commitment to his language is like the commitment to music."

Throughout his career in theater, though, Mr. Greif has found that audiences are looking for the same things. "People like to be surprised, and they also like to be able to believe in the characters they're seeing onstage," he says. "They want to be able to believe in something, and they also want to be completely surprised and taken someplace they'd never imagined they'd go. That was true at the beginning of my career, and it seems true now."