Peter Foy, 79; Master of Stage Flight Sent "Peter Pan" Soaring
LA Times
“First, I must blow the fairy dust on you,” Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, tells the Darling children the first time he guides them aloft. Flying is so easy that there is only one other thing they must do: “Think lovely thoughts.”
Peter Foy understood the lovely thoughts. You could read them on his gleaming face when he operated the ropes, wires and pulleys that sent Mary Martin soaring over a Broadway stage in the 1954 musical version of “Peter Pan,” the J.M. Barrie classic. Foy was the master of stage flight — “aerography,” he called it — who perfected the mechanisms that enabled Martin’s signature flight and those of countless others. He was the technical wizard who sent more Peter Pans on their magical journeys than anyone else in his unusual business.
Foy was the founder of Flying by Foy, a 48-year-old company that specializes in theatrical flying effects. The transplanted Englishman died Feb. 17 of natural causes in Las Vegas, his home for the last four decades. He was 79.
His machines flew just about all the notable Peter Pans, from Jean Arthur and Martin to Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby, as well as most of the less-famous ones. He stopped counting at 6,000 productions worldwide.
My heart belongs
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