DICK
WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT
Hackney
Empire, London E8
Opened 5 December, 2007
****
"Posh panto" may be gaining ground at the Barbican and the Old Vic, but
connoisseurs of the genre have long known that writer/director Susie
McKenna's productions at Hackney are the real deal. This one has the
mandatory messy "slosh" scene, an undersea ballet, and the ghost
routine is missing only because we are treated instead to a magnificent
12-foot gorilla. My trusty watch made it a zippy 13 minutes until the
cue for the audience to shout out, "Behind you!" and a reasonable 31
minutes to the first "Oh yes, it is!"/"Oh, no, it isn't!" shouting
match; however, it took a disappointing two hours 12 mins until
principal boy Dick slapped his/her thigh.
McKenna's roster of panto artists is headed by a mighty trio. From her
arsenal of characters Tameka Empson chooses her amiable-doddering
persona for Fairy Bowbells, and Kat B is now one of the finest panto
comedy sidekicks I know; his Idle Jack is the perfect silly big
brother, his good nature never flagging even when some precocious young
punters pre-empt one of his big punchlines. But the powerhouse
performance is Clive Rowe's as Sarah the Cook. One of the glorious
oddities of this season is that serious critics can laud a burly man
for making such an implausible transvestite, but Rowe deserves it all
and more. Whether belting out show tunes or nestling the face of
Alderman Fitzwarren between his ample prosthetic bosoms, Rowe never
lets up for a second. If we could harness that immense natural energy,
our greenhouse-emission worries would be over.
David Ashley follows up a successful Ugly Sister last year by making an
agreeably sneering, slinky King Rat. Hannah-Jane Fox is an appealing
Dick apart from her musical-theatre nose-voice in song; she is matched
if not bettered by Sophia Ragavelas as Dick's beloved Alice, who this
time takes an equal part in all his adventures; "You don't know what
it's like to be a girl!" she complains to Dick, leading them both to
regard the audience quizzically for a beat. Steven Edis's score runs
from contemporary R&B to Toots and the Maytals' reggae classic
"Monkey Man", a duet for fairy and big ape. It's all enough to keep a
sadly less-than-full house bubbling over for two and a half hours.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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