Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Never ones (in my experience) to go for a truly traditional panto, SADS have this year chosen a version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (from Limelight Scripts) that somehow managed to incorporate Ant and Dec, the crazy Professor Stein and Frankenstein’s Monster! Well, why not, it is panto and SADS do seem to have hit upon a winning formula, with a full house on the first night and virtually sold out for the other three performances.

Director Martin Letts has drawn together a very talented cast and chorus. After the National Anthem (a nice tradition to maintain), the fun was quickly underway and the enthusiastic audience was soon joining in with all the traditional responses, being whipped up by Roy Phillips as Dame Dolly Dumpling, a nicely sardonic performance, and Danny Jeffs as Igor – a great singer, who knows how to work a live audience. Emilie Varcoe made a truly wicked baddie as the witch Frogmella, cackling perfectly as her schemes to obtain the magic cooking pot and kidnap Baby Bear very nearly succeeded, no thanks to her incompetent side-kicks Ant and Dec, played with great energy and verve by Liam Gray and Matthew Dillon – a good double-act. Countering evil with good was Karen Garside, delightful as Fairy Good.

Annie Dillon gave us a very sweet and innocent Goldilocks who, sadly, didn’t seem to be given a love interest by the script. The Three Bears were most endearing, with Roger Minors as Father, Shuna Rose as Mother and a very confident, strong performance from George Walton as Baby Bear. Jane Foster and Nicki Cresswell were an inspired pairing as the daft policemen – with beautifully timed echoing of each other’s words and well maintained “hup, hup, hup” entrances and exits. Mike Clay gave a great comic performance as the crazy Professor Stein, keeping up his German accent and eccentric behaviour well. I mustn’t forget Buttercup the Cow – somehow from inside the costume Jayne Dowsett and Vijay Desai gave her great character - or Mike Rich who made Frankenstein’s monster rather loveable!

Throughout the show, singing by the soloists and the chorus was of good quality and the inventive choreography was well executed. The three-piece band produced a good sound to accompany them, though thanks to some first night technical issues (largely resolved during the interval), they sometimes overwhelmed the cast a little.

As I’ve come to expect from this group, the set was first class, and I’m always amazed by the quality and ingenuity of the props used – a great credit to the props and set design/construction teams. Costumes too were of excellent quality, really colourful and fitting for the characters. Pyrotechnics enhanced the atmosphere, but I felt that the lighting design could have been a little more inventive – a green light on Frogmella, for example, and dimmed really low when they were in the secret tunnel.

It’s always good to see a society like SADS that takes such an interest in furthering the talents of its younger members. They helped add life to this show and you could easily see how they will graduate to the more senior roles in the future, ensuring that the group will continue to flourish in the years to come.

The enthusiastic applause at the end of the show was a great testament to how much we all enjoyed the performance and appreciated how much hard work and dedication had gone into it.

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