York Theatre Royal – until Saturday 25 January 2020
Review by Zoe Giles
3***
This year sees Martin Barrass take on the main role from the legendary York panto dame Berwick Kaler, for as many years as I can remember Martin has played right hand man to Berwick so it was lovely to finally see him take centre stage playing the Queen and come into his own, he did this alongside two other firm pantomime favourites at the York Theatre Royal Suzy Cooper as Beauty and the wonderfully wicked David Leonard as Evil Diva a role he was born to play getting the audience to
shout and boo and hiss every time he made an appearance.
York’s most famous and well-known pantomime dame has however still had a major part to play in this year’s production as Berwick has still written this year’s panto and directed along with Matt Aston, and made several guest appearances during the evening’s performance.
As usual there is all the slap stick tongue in cheek humour, we have come to expect from the classic York Theatre Royal panto, along with the good old sing a long session, and all the other usual fun and games, however I personally felt now was the time to bring it in to the 21st century and update the routines and give us something different and unexpected as with Berwick retiring this would have been the perfect opportunity to do so.
Full credit to Anthony Lamble for the amazing, outstanding and colourful costumes and set design both are wonderful and the hours of work that must have gone into producing such eye-catching costumes is unimaginable, the stage design too is dazzling, adding in the lighting from director Mark Jonathan and the mood is really set as we are taken along the performance.
Musical director Elliot Styche and Choreographer Grace Harrington must also have worked hard and closely together with all the members of the orchestra and dancers to achieve such memorable and beautiful pieces and scenes, performed by all the cast and they were very talented as were the young children who appeared alongside them,giving confident and strong stage performances.
However a huge disappointment for myself and my family personally is that the well known and much loved classic story of Sleeping Beauty is so far removed from the pantomime interpretation that we found it really hard to follow and so the children became bored and restless, we also noticed after the interval several empty seats from people who hadn’t even bothered to return I can only assume this is because it was so hard to follow.