When the CLO's "Peter Pan" opened last week, I was also away (see yesterday's journal entry), so Kate Luce Angell did the review honors.

But having interviewed Cathy Rigby for the preview and been subjected to her feisty, pint-pot practicality and charm -- not to mention that she's still a cutie at 50-something -- I wanted to watch her work. After all, as my preview noted, she's been playing Peter off and on for 35 years -- this is one of those famous life-time roles, like Yul's King of Siam and Carol's Dolly Levi.

She was worth the visit. I came late, thanks to the Pirates-Yankees crowd and a lightening-and-thunder downpour of Biblical intensity, but I was there in time to see her truculent Little Rascal appeal as she persuades Wendy to fly away to Neverland. Rigby makes a great boy, and there were several times when I felt just exactly the surge of parental concern that the show is designed to elicit,

Rigby also clearly enjoys the flying, which is, after all, what we come for. She does it with zest and an abundance of heedless derring-do, plus an aw-shucks self-assurance. The book of the musical doesn't have any of the deep melancholy that pervades several versions of the original James Barrie story (or certainly the James Barrie life), but whatever moments of regret or parental tenderness the show does express, Rigby zeroed in and harvested them all.