Stratford’s Christmas shows have in
recent years tried rather too hard to recognise the diversity of the
theatre’s local audience by taking tales traditional to pantomime and
giving them either exotic or “urban” makeovers, yet paradoxically
thereby losing the all-together spirit of more typical renderings. This
year writer Hope Massiah has rowed back somewhat and struck a happy
medium, with little or nothing present here that would be out of place
in the “updates” list of any conventional-yet-smart panto.
Hansel and Gretel here relocate to the forest with their father when
city life proves too expensive; their new stepmother is not wicked so
much as self-centred, resolving to lose the children in the woods so
that she can live
à deux
with her beloved hubby; she regains a proper perspective in time for a
happy ending. Marcus Powell plays this role in a style closer to modest
drag than the more usual pantomime-dame territory: he wiggles and
flutes, and also gets a fine down’n’dirty blues number just before the
interval. The score as a whole spurns the laziness of stapling-in pop
standards in favour of original songs properly integrated with the
narrative and characters. Most deliciously and ridiculously, when the
two children attempt to escape from the house of the wicked witch who
has captured them, they are stopped by an alarm in the form of Nathan
Amzi kitted out like a black leather Viking and screeching a parody of
Scandinavian death metal.
Denizens of the forest include Monty Mole, hampered in his Woodland
Watch duties by his species’ near-blindness, and the curiously
prancing, hooting figure of Peter Howe as Yellow Bird, who confronts
his own cowardice by helping the children escape Josephine
Lloyd-Welcome’s agreeably cackling, grey-dreadlocked witch. Darren Hart
as Hansel keeps consulting
Courting
For Dummies in his attempts to win the landlord’s tomboy
daughter, who is later turned into a mouse in a subplot that is one of
the show’s few misfires; Natalie Best also lacks a compelling
shtick as Gretel. But Dawn Reid’s
production has the requisite energy and dedication, and if it does not
quite attain the rumbustiousness of Stratford shows several years ago,
it’s well on the way back there.
Written for the Financial
Times.