Alice in Wonderland

It was good to be back at the newly refurbished Regal Theatre for their annual sell out Panto.  Louis had written this Panto and managed to add as many corny jokes into the script as was possible. The script also gave a good opportunity to many of the cast,  not just the main principals to show off their talents. We opened not with the normal fairy, but  with a Caterpillar sitting on her toadstool, played by Ffyona Dudley who kept up her  feisty but amusing character throughout.  Sharon Preece as The White Rabbit  was delightful and gave  the role plenty of energy popping up  throughout. Tempany Clements  captured the character of  Alice nicely  and I particularly enjoyed the part when she was  presenting their version of ‘Strictly’.  Lorna, Alice’s sister was played by Nyiesha Austin gave us some excellent powerful songs and duets. Callum Limer was The Cheshire Cat, a wonderful comedy performance, and Joe Marsh was perfect as  the weird and wacky  Mad Hatter. Mention must be made of The Queen of Hearts, Cassandra Fisher not least for her amazing dance sequence and all praise to Meryl and Lauren for their choreography. The three girls playing the 1, 2 and 3 of Hearts worked well together in this their comedy roles and I loved the dancing flowers with their petal heads.  Well done to all the cast, including the junior chorus some of which was their first Panto.  You are the future of the Society, like so many of the cast who have come up through the Youth groups and now go on with lead roles. So as they say “Keep on dancing” and singing.

There were several major challenges to overcome with the new layout of the stage; with there being no facility to use front of tabs or an apron to cover the scenery changes. This unfortunately affected the pace of the production in front of permanently open tabs. It was distracting but hopefully I was in a minority.   Perhaps a reduction in the number of scenes may have been advantageous given the problems. The scenery was minimalistic  which was for the best with limited opportunity to change scenes but the backdrops which were used were nice and brightly painted. The lighting was mainly good, bright and colourful when full up.

The music on ‘click tracks’ worked well and the personal microphones for all the main characters  assisted with good sound quality. Praise also to Sue Ogden the MD for a good mixture of diverse songs throughout. The costumes by Lesley Grout, Meryl Bunce and Nigel Lungley-Radford were as usual excellent, being both colourful and appropriate.

Well done to Louis for this his first time of writing a script to be produced on stage and at directing, and to all his cast and crew battling on with constant Covid testing and producing an enjoyable Panto to a very appreciative audience.   

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