I have to agree with the original poster here; if anything, I liked the show even less than he (she?) did. At times I found it almost painful to watch, mostly due to my embarrassment for the actors, who are to be commended for their excellent work at pushing a boulder up a hill.
In addition to the fine points made by Teacher64, I would add:
* The tone of the score didn't match the tone of the book at all, and neither matched the tone of the choreography. I don't mind modern scores for period shows per se; I think they work well for "Spring Awakening" and "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", but those shows carried the stylistic elements of their scores throughout the whole piece, so it felt like you were viewing an earlier time period from a contemporary point of view. "Finding Neverland" didn't do that. The writers just took a naturalistic play set in 1904 and threw in some pop songs, and didn't even bother to tailor them to the specific characters. Every character's songs sounded just like everyone else's, including the children. Imperfect rhymes and poor scansion didn't help the situation. And the choreography seemed like it had wandered in from a nearby production of "Seussical".
* The heightened emotions of the songs were not set up properly by the book. The best examples of this are "Hook" and "Stronger", in which Barrie is seen struggling mightily with the fears and doubts that prevent him from moving forward with his play. All well and good, but where was all this struggling prior to the end of Act I? Up to this point, we had seen him express a few quiet reservations about losing his inspiration, but nothing remotely on the scale of the writhing and turmoil he goes through here. At one point in "Stronger", he actually tears off his shirt, like some sort of Edwardian Hulk. So for me, the numbers came off as silly and forced, and not at all in keeping with Barrie's character.
* Some of the anachronisms in the book really bothered me. References to existentialism (a term that wasn't even coined until the 1940's) and the subconscious (coined in the 18th century, but not popularized until the 1920's) came off as cheap attempts at depth, and phrases like "Nice try" and "Last night was fun!" were just easy laughs that ended up distancing me from the characters.
How did the audience respond on the Saturday night I saw it? Well, they did cheer and applaud, but afterwards I heard a lot of the same "meh" reactions that Teacher64 did. My wife felt pretty much the same way I did, as did the young woman sitting next to me, whom I had never met before, but who didn't hesitate to share her reactions with me. All in all, a big disappointment for me, since I had really been looking forward to seeing this story told as a musical.
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