list.co.uk/theatre Panto reviews | THEATRE
MOTHER GOOSE King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jan ●●●●●
CINDERELLA King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until Sun 6 Jan ●●●●● PUSS IN BOOTS Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, until Sat 5 Jan ●●●●●
As traditional as turkey, tinsel and forcing a jolly grin to get you through the season, the only festive trio you’ll need this Christmas (three wise men? what three wise men?), Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and Grant Stott, return to the King’s for their annual panto shenanigans.
This year it’s Mother Goose, and it’s a typically irreverent take on the classic fairy tale, with Stewart as the matronly titular character who goes off in search of beauty and riches – at a cost.
Gray hams it up charmingly as her servant-
cum-love interest, while Stott’s Demon Vanity is a space-age Julian Clary baddie at whom to direct your boos. It has to be said that the song and dance numbers grow tiresome after the first few (it opens, inevitably, with ‘Gangnam Style’), but the main trio’s corpsing and ad-libbing throughout is really infectious, making for an energetic, familial atmosphere.
Added to that, there’s enough near-the-knuckle innuendo for some laugh aloud moments for adults, as well as a lovely moral message for the little ones: be careful what you wish for, it might just come true. (Kirstyn Smith)
For all the conflicting needs of a commercial pantomime show – slapstick and continual visual flair for the kids; just enough of a sense of structure and bite for the adults with them; ropey jokes and song and dance routines (here, to pop hits like ‘Gangnam Style’ and Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’) for everybody – the panto at Glasgow’s King’s surely remains one of the market leaders. This latest take on Cinderella is studiedly
traditional and all the better for it, whipped up to a fast pace by director Tony Cownie and visually marvellous both for the sets, the costumes and the effects . With strong support from Steven McNicoll and
John Ramage, and Jenny Douglas and Kieran Brown anchoring the piece with the straight roles of Cinderella and Prince Charming, the possibly slightly overlong at three hours production turned on three excellent comedy turns: the endlessly watchable Karen Dunbar as a crude Gorbals Fairy Godmother, a sharp Des Clarke as Buttons and a winningly grotesque and ludicrously dressed pairing of Gavin Mitchell and Gordon Cooper as the Ugly Sisters. Clarke’s tribute to late King’s panto stalwart Gerard Kelly in the dedications is appropriate – he would surely have approved. (David Pollock)
Puss comes to Musselburgh in a pantomime that has just about everything you could wish for: a genuine sweetie shower (one of the few left); songs ancient and modern; a great dame; and references so local that you won’t get them unless you live in EH21.
Americans are not renowned for their ability to get pantomime. But it seems that, at his first attempt, American-born Tim Licata – best known as the clowning artistic director of Plutôt la Vie – has got it spot on.
He is blessed with a great script from Philip
Meeks which has been honed into a truly local affair. Isabella Jarrett’s Wicked Witch Wysteria is holding Musselburgh to ransom. She wants to marry Tom Freeman’s numpty King McMuckletts, while Stephen Docherty’s throaty Dame Doris Dimple has to make tatty scones for Wysteria’s ogre son, Rumbletum.
The juicily rewritten songs shine through, particularly when Kim Shepherd’s Princes Fiona gets her larynx round them. It’s not faultless – the pace and ebullience need to pick up in the opening scenes – but for a show of this budget it achieves well above its aspirations. (Thom Dibdin)
AGANEZA SCROOGE Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 5 Jan ●●●●●
The Tron panto has always had a cheeky disregard for every other Christmas show in town, but 2012 will be remembered as the year it declared outright war on Scottish theatre. Johnny McKnight’s uproarious demolition job on Dickens
manages also to take sideswipes at the Krankies at the SECC, to include a song with a chorus that rhymes ‘whole lot worse’ with Edinburgh’s Traverse and, at a point when it takes a turn for the depressing, to suggest Aganeza Scrooge is turning into a National Theatre of Scotland show. Little chance of that, although actually, it makes an inspired companion piece to the NTS’s sell-out version of A Christmas Carol, currently wowing them in Fife. McKnight replaces that show’s gothic creepiness with a heightened air of panto panic, throwing in daft routines, excellent songs and lots of audience backchat without ever losing sight of the original. So brazenly does he mould the seasonal tale into a knockabout romp, he almost makes you forget it has never been a panto staple and that jokes about abject Victorian poverty (‘They’re a poor house – they’re supposed to be poor’) would be considered bad taste in any other theatre.
And you’re very willing to forget Dickens didn’t write for an
all-women cast, so compelling is the cross-dressed McKnight and the superb female company (plus ace understudy Darren Brownlie) as they race from Dickensian Street to Aganeza’s Merchant City boudoir in search of panto past, present and yet to be. There’s so much to love about the show – from Kenny Miller’s gorgeous monochrome designs to Sally Reid as Tiny Tim and her running joke about polio – that you may not notice how faithful McKnight is to A Christmas Carol. What you certainly do notice, though, is how moving is Aganeza’s redemption and how joyous the final chorus of ‘All I Want for Christmas’. (Francis McLachlan)
13 Dec 2012–24 Jan 2013 THE LIST 131
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