Alice in Pantoland

The Johnstone Phoenix are well known for their pantomimes within the local community with tickets flying out the door as early as 7 months before the show opens.  This resulted in a full house for the cast to perform in front of and a great buzz in the audience as the panto started.  A sparkling opening number by a talented ensemble kick-started the story and set the level of the energy we were to expect throughout the show.  Alice in Pantoland as a story is based on and follows a similar tale to, Alice in Wonderland with lots of characters introduced keeping the story moving and audience engaged.  The story followed Alice and her best friend Susie as they accidently follow the White Rabbit into pantoland, to return his lost shopping bag.  The bags contents are key to the story as it holds more Jam for the Queen, as all her jam has been eaten by the Jammerwocky monster.  On their arrival, Alice and Susie are quickly set on a task to rid pantoland of the Jammerwocky and as their quest progresses they meet lots of interesting friends.  Alice was played by Jennifer Scott, who gave a brilliant performance capturing the sweet, enchanting leading lady.  Robyn Crawford was excellent and well-cast as the confident, gutsy Essex accented Susie, who balanced the sweetness of Alice with her sass in their duo.  Jennifer and Robyn complimented each other and worked well together.  The reason they reach pantoland is because of Ross White’s droll White Rabbit who appears entertainingly at intervals within the story as different characters in the wrong panto.  Ross’s lethargic character walk, slow speech delivery and snobbish accent brought a lot of comedy to the role and he had the audience laughing on each of his entrances.  Jam is key to the story, and in charge of making the Jam is our dame, The Dutchess (Stuart MacKay).  Stuart commanded the stage and audience with ease, with his comic timing shining through.  It was a brilliant performance aided by the numerous conversations with his unsuspecting audience victim, which were hilarious and well controlled throughout the show.  The Dutchess’ son’s Tweedle Dee (Sarah Carruthers) and Tweedle Dum (Jessica Kerr) gave a great double act with silly comedy both in dialogue and physicality.  Their scenes with Susie in particular were very entertaining.  The Dutchess’ main Jam customer is The Queen, who was captured brilliantly by Shiranne Burns.  Shiranne brought us the baddie role of the panto, spurring the audience on to Boo her and using her strong stage presence and experience to rule her scenes.  In particular the vocals within her solo number were fantastic.  Plotting behind The Queen’s back to take her thrown was the eerie and mischievous Knave, played by Wynter Elliot.  Wynter’s creepy characterisation was well delivered and merited the audience reactions.  Linking the story together was the lovely Kirsty Reid as Fairy Know It All.  Kirsty’s fairy character was beautiful, delightful and ditzy as she helped Alice on her quest with impeccable fairy characterisation.  Completing this talented principal line up was; Daniel McDonald as the eccentric , animated and hilarious Mad Hatter, Jennifer Scott as the expressive and crazy March Hare and Jessica Logan as the cheeky and witty Dormouse.  Daniel, Jennifer and Jessica worked well together and produced a very entertaining trio in there comical scenes.  The tea party number and gag, with Alice and The Dutchess, was well executed and energetic.  One of the lovely benefits of this show for the club was that every member of the cast had a named character part, too many to list in the report, but it allowed every member to show their talent as triple threat; actors, singers and dancers.  The staging and use of video screens as a backdrop and as portals was brilliantly used, especially for encouraging the audience to shout out at the right times throughout.  A huge well done to the production team of Carol, Cat and Amy on an entertaining panto with great characterisation, lively / cheesy music and energetic dances.  A great panto to add to the club’s panto repertoire.

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