SLEEPING BEAUTY. TO 6 jANUARY.
London
SLEEPING BEAUTY
by Andrew Pollard
Greenwich Theatre To 6 January 2007
Tue 11am & 3pm
Wed-Sat 2pm & 7pm
Audio-described 5 Jan 2pm & 7pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 020 8858 7755
www.greenwichtheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 31 December
Light, bright panto pleasure.
Greenwich has come up with a very pleasant pantomime. If several references are likely to go over younger heads, it hardly matters as they whiz past in the helter-skelter of patter and song with which writer Andrew Pollard (also playing the Dame) and director Phil Willmott pepper their show.
Designer Ralph Oswick provides a colourful setting - with costumes to match - varied by a central revolve that allows garden, royal kitchen (the cookery scene’s inventive if light on the slapstick) and dark forest cottage for Princess Rose to receive the necessary prick on her 16th birthday.
There are zestful characterisations, Paul Critoph a keen overgrown schoolboy of a monarch, Billy Bogbean an ever-helpful gardener’s lad with a cross-breed dogrose that fulfils both syllables of the name. It’s no surprise Ally Holmes’ wicked witch Belladonna reforms in the end; always at the young, sexy end of witchery, she’s never been that nasty, while good Fairy Flax, in Bea Holland’s energetic presence, shows far-from-simpering virtue.
Handsome Prince Sylvanus, a flora-phile along with Billy, first seems a nerd, but Alton Letto soon flings off unbecoming coat and specs in the way Hollywood used to treat beauties in severe specs and pinned-back hair. He’s more than matched by Juliet Mary McGill’s thoroughly modern Princess, the show’s most interesting character dramatically: a teenager not only in love but rebelling against the frustrating limitations her father’s protectiveness has cast over her emerging personality.
McGill’s Rose lets rip with several songs plundered from the past pop catalogue; this is a pantomime waiting to turn into a musical. But not with Pollard around, it won’t. His Dame’s in the tradition of northern (judging by accent) comedy, happily vulgar and tartly sweet, looking like a vertically-extended Arthur Askey. She’s a two-cylinder creation of pneumatic bliss, powered by the twin-mammaries she’s repeatedly pressing as if she owned them.
The vulgarity’s never offensive, the beeping-out of swear-words in her most outspoken moment neatly comic. True, act 2 falls short on story, and starts seeming padded by so many songs. But this remains a happy panto: colourful, kind-hearted yet gutsily energetic.
King Meadowsweet: Paul Critoph
Billy Bogbean: Howard Gossington
Nanny Fanny: Andrew Pollard
Fairy Flax: Bea Holland
Belladonna Bindweed: Ally Holmes
Princess Rose: Juliet Mary McGill
Prince Sylvanus: Alton Letto
Ensemble: Ross Coates, Natalie Harman, Adam Jones, Kandyce Walters
Director: Phil Willmott
Designer: Ralph Oswick
Additional set: Hiss and Boo Company
Lighting: Hansjorg Schmidt
Sound: Orbital Sound
Musical Director: Steve Markwick
Choreographer: Ally Holmes
2007-01-01 21:08:29