Pixie Dust Has Nothing to Do With It

Too bad you don’t get frequent-flier miles for this kind of air travel.

Former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby, who comes to Hollywood’s Pantages Theater from Tuesday to Aug. 16 in her second touring production of “Peter Pan,” guesses she has flown some 1,500 flights onstage as the boy who never wants to grow up.

And Rigby, who plans to take this show to Broadway, where she garnered a Tony nomination in 1991 for her role as Peter, says she still hasn’t tired of the experience.

“After 1,500 performances, what it reminds me of now is, at first you are laboring over a move in gymnastics, but after a while . . . you get to a level where you are so strong that there is a freedom about it, that’s where the fun of it comes in,” Rigby said by phone from Kansas City, Mo., where this highly athletic production played in an outdoor theater in 100-degree heat (actually, the weather usually cooled to 90 at night, she noted wryly).

“It isn’t that flying is difficult,” she said. “The hardest thing when you are first starting out is that you are wearing a harness and two mike packs, and this tunic made of leather and leaves; it all gets very heavy.”

Despite leather and leaves, however, Rigby said that she still feels the magic of flying every time she does it. “I wish I had the words to describe it,” she bubbled. “We are in an outdoor theater now, and when the wind is blowing and the stars are out--well, I almost forgot what I was doing the other day, I almost forgot to put my harness on. I said to myself, you are really getting carried away here.”

Unlike Peter Pan, who never grows up, Rigby is 45, and she worried at first that dancing through the air as Peter Pan again on tour might be too much for her fit but mature body. But the magic worked here as well.

“At the beginning of the tour, my back was hurting and my knees were hurting and I said, you know, Peter Pan is getting a little bit older now,” she acknowledged. “But now nothing hurts--I guess your body just gets used to it. I actually feel stronger now than on the last ‘Peter Pan’ tour, but it took six months for me to feel like that.”

Compared to the high-tech special effects audiences have come to expect in magic shows, movies and big-budget Broadway musicals, the flying effect in “Peter Pan” may seem almost quaint.

Created by ZFX, a 4-year-old flying company that replaced the venerable Flying by Foy used in Rigby’s first “Peter Pan” tour, the flying effect is created with a simple harness, equipped with a metal back plate with a spring-loaded metal pin for easy removal. The harness connects the flyer with a cable, which in turn attaches to an overhead system of tracks and pulleys, all housed in a portable truss (that’s a square formation of steel pipes with a hollow center that moves with the show from theater to theater).

ZFX President Terri Kirsch, one of the company’s founders, said she often sizes the Peter Pan harnesses by using her 11-year-old daughter, Heather, as a model. At 5 feet and 90 pounds, Heather is about the size of the small gymnasts who often portray Peter Pan. They fly heavier folks too, who tend to require a double harness, Kirsch added. “At Easter time, we fly a lot of Gabriels for churches, and they are usually very big--these are large singers with large bellies,” she said.

Kirsch said ZFX flies not only people, but the hot-air balloon and Glinda the Good Witch’s bubble for productions of “The Wizard of Oz” or ghosts in “A Christmas Carol”; they’ve flown “a lot of Supermans” and created swimming effects, drowning effects, and dropped a lot of Alices through the looking glass in “Alice in Wonderland.”

This production of “Peter Pan” does not employ the motors and hydraulic units that have become standard in Broadway and Las Vegas stage spectaculars. “The system we have here is all manual,” said Paul Rubin, ZFX technical illusionist. “With hydraulics, you can spend a million dollars and have it look as though someone is actually flying--but our priority is to be able to install and take it down in two hours.”

Rubin said that, as the show travels, the height of the ceiling of the theater (or the height of the rigging that must be built for an outdoor venue), the depth of the orchestra pit, and the height of the bank of theater seats all must be taken into consideration. The goal, he said, is to fly Rigby as far out over the audience as possible for a magical moment at the end of the show.

Over the years, people have asked Rigby whether flying through the air, with nothing but a harness and a cable just one-16th-inch thick between her and the forces of gravity, is as terrifying as it sounds. The answer is: Well, not compared to her previous life as a gymnast, she said.

“People say isn’t it scary, but when you are jumping on a 4-inch piece of apparatus, this is really nothing compared to that, the risk involved is much less--knock on wood,” Rigby said.

So far, Rigby has suffered no serious injuries as a result of flying, although she admits to a minor mishap during one performance in the 1990-91 tour. “I was flying a little too fast through the crow’s nest on the ship, and I put out my hands to stop myself, but I forgot that I had a sword in my hand,” she said. The audience must have thought [the blood] was a great special effect, but I ended up having 15 stitches over my eye.”

Though lightweight, the harness can hold 1,200 pounds. Kirsch said that, so far, ZFX has had no falls or major injuries. There’s more danger, she said, of a dancer onstage tripping over his or her own feet or having a piece of lighting equipment fall on their heads than to fly.

ZFX’s Rubin prefers to call its flying effect an “illusion” because it sounds more magical. But face it--if you look not too hard, you can see the harnesses and cables, and it’s not difficult to figure out that a character who suddenly disappears behind a bush may have someone hiding there to help attach them to the cable. In this production, the signal that the actor is properly hooked in is a tap on the shoulder. If you don’t get the tap, you may end up singing “I’m flying!” onstage when you are most decidedly not.

But Rigby, as well as representatives of ZFX, say audiences seem willing to suspend disbelief for “Peter Pan”--although it’s the kids, not their parents, who are the toughest to fool, Rubin notes. Rigby said the same sense of wonder seems to come over the cast, crew and friends of the show whom ZFX gives as a special gift the opportunity to fly on their birthdays.

“When they put the harness on, their first reaction is: “Oh, my gosh, you do a whole show in this thing?’ Then they put the cable on it, and there is a little bit of fear and anticipation, like they are about to jump out of a plane,” Rigby said.

“But then they start squealing, and sort of laughing, and there is this feeling of, hey, they are floating up there. It’s fabulous, it’s fun, and they never want to come down.”

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“PETER PAN,” Pantages Theater, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Dates: Opens Tuesday. Plays Tuesdays to Fridays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 16. Prices: $22-$48. Phone: (213) 365-3500.