Monthly Archives: December 2020

     O YES IT IS

      I had booked us in the very day Lloyd Webber and QDOS announced that with antiviral door handles, fogging, separating of bubbles and teeth-gritted determination,  Oh  Yes There Would  be a  panto – or as near as dammit – at the Palladium in 2020.  On the far side of Lockdown 2 with the capital teetering on the brink of tier 3 closing  anywhere suspected of entertaining, we reported  to row J, temperatures  taken, paws disinfected.  

         And up went the curtain, and up struck the orchestra, and Beverley Knight in crazy pink feathers belted out a newborn song saying basically hey, here we all are, guys, welcome to Pantoland and the  Palladium after a trying year.  So  everyone roared through masks,  understanding that having bought tickets and turned out we the audience  were a vital part of a little miracle of defiance and star-studded frivolity.  Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the blue gags flying here! .

    Impressively blue, indeed, not only host Julian Clary’s enormous fluffy cerulean cape and headgear but his abundant, ever trouser-based ,camp innuendos.   One hopes that for the Royal children’s visit the day before he toned some of them down. A bit, anyway. Though who knows, they may be filthy minded already? Their social stratum is famously robust after a day’s shootin’…

       Clary as always owns the stage, the flamboyant, scornful standup wit at the centre of the key quartet of clowns.  Gary Wilmot in a yellow Dame crinoline sings his London Underground song, Paul Zerdin achieves the classiest of ventriloquist acts, culminating when his puppet duets contemptuously with an admirably game Beverley Knight: she singing I will Always Love You – straight – the monster jeering. And Nigel Havers returns to his beloved role of serial  insultee, in a series of outfits from Dandini to plum pudding. Charlie Stemp dances featly, and Jac Yarrow from Joseph is back on the stage where he broke through.  When  the key four, led by a remarkably spry Clary ,do their beloved split- second twelve days of Christmas routine the house brings the roof  off. Hard to believe it’s only 60 per cent full.

    It’s a pure variety trick. Indeed that is the form of the show, wisely eschewing any one plot (risky these days, Cameron Mac with Les Mis had to have two understudies per part). Rather they bring on star acts, themed loosely: the  breakdance group Diversity are vaguely Robin Hood, and Elaine Paige turns up in the second half as Queen Rat with a curious Webberish mishmash of her old themes, to be insulted in turn. 

     The Covid jokes are all good, Clary observing that a sea of blue paper masks looks like “Invasion of the J Cloths”, and Zerdin’s vent puppet flirting with a front row woman with  “get yer nose out for the lads!”.  The whole thing is artfully designed to seem as if the stars just got together with minimal rehearsal for a lark. While in fact it is – like the Palladium’s own organisation – split-second sharp, in and out to the minute and with all gaffes planned. Not for the very youngest probably, but for the rest of us over-7s and our inner child  a proper, silly, defiant  showbiz shot in the arm. 

   Box office http://www.lwtheatres.co.Uk.   to 3 Jan

Rating is inappropriate for these resurrections. Trust the description only, and here’s a Christmouse!

Great journeys told in tiny windows

      The daily epics of the refugee crisis haunt us on every bulletin:: small boat crossings, lethal lorry journeys, arrests and detentions. It. Is right for storytellers to  draw us back into the small individual. realities of these lives.The novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers imagined,  from much that we know, two Afghan brothers – children – over two years making their way from Kabul via Turkey, Iran, Italy and CalaIs. There are treks, trains, a Medterranen crossing. They are conned, enslaved on farms, one is raped:: they meet odd kindnesses,an uncle, brutalities. They dream.  

       Here it is told in strange privacy to each of us, led through darkened corrridors below the theatre to tiny booths and headphones ,so that before each of us unrolls a carousel of dollshouse dioramas , with the boys as simple models and the scenes vivid. The sounds and narrator immmerse us. After months of video,  film or animation and. the odd unsatisfactory punt at interaction, this curiosity is movingly real. When the boys see police with their harsh foreign languages and guns  they see them as angry giant seagulls, squawking.When they sleep they and we see birds in glorious flight. Bird metaphors flood through it.

   It grips, provokes both sorrow and rage at the people traffickers driving the desperate.  Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, who worked on Harry Potter, achieve a humbler sort of magic here. Proper theatre it feels like , alone in our tiny lonely booths, looking out at a harsh world, transported with pity and terror.

Box office http://www.bridgetheatre.com   To 16 Jan, with luck.

Rating. Four. 

MINIATURE REVELS

They’re at it again. And in this dour year, crowned with the financially reckless renaissance of West End theatre, Dan and Jeff – Daniel Clarkson and Jeff Turner – are welcome home to the daytime West End. .  Their  “Potted Potter” assault on the Rowling canon in 80 minutes got thumbs up from the actual New  York Times , their two-handed Potter absurdism pleased the Rowlingites no end, and long years ago a Christmas-jaded Times critic (me) called an earlier incarnation of this 70 minute lark  “Cheap, cheerful, deafening if you’re surrounded by ten-year-olds, but not dumb. “

    It’s actually polished up better in this season of compulsorily half-empty houses and scrupulous virus-bashing.  Nor is there any truth in the  rumour that panto  whooping, shouting and jumping in the seats would be banned in favour of silent hi-fives and the like for our welfare.   There’s a fair bit of audience racket, though it never felt worrying –  given the distanced seats and the fact that the noisiest were plainly family bubbles some distance away.  The shtick is the same – bossy Jeff, irresponsible Dan, lightning change of  costume bits, cracker- jokes and the clever  debunking of same, plus a couple of startling extras, puppets and bits of unexpected set to keep it going.  

     Attempting six panto stories in the time is the idea, while Dan demands A Christmas Carol be included and forces Ebenezer Scrooge onto Abanazar of Aladdin; they bring in ghost-gags, roarings of oh yes it is, a brief but wicked front row involvement , and some very funny new ways of waking Sleeping Beauty. There’s snow, and a songsheet, and just enough Boris-COVID-distancing gags (the pair are a bubble, thank goodness).  

     And I was charmed to see how hilarious even quite small children find the repeated appearance of Dan’s Hooray-Henry interpretation of Prince Charming,  thrilled with himself and bored of princesses. 

To 11 Jan, God willing.

Box Office on 0330 333 4815 or access@nimaxtheatres.com

Rating. Four