Hansel and Gretel

First impressions of my first experience of this society’s pantos were very good with the curtains open on a super set, and this quality remained throughout.  A NODA panto, written by society Life Member Ron Hall, it was an old fashioned type of show with a pretty large cast including a dancing troupe of more than 20, an eight piece orchestra, 26 musical numbers plus an overture and quite a wordy script.

The “goodies” were strongly led by the Forest Fairy, very nicely performed by Paula Paylor who spoke clearly and sang well, and Miss Daisy Demeanour, the School Mistress, performed by Marcus Burnside.  Supporting them extremely well was Stephen Temple as Willie who the script refers to as a “well known twit”!  All three quickly built a good rapport with the audience and Willie even came in on what appeared to be a hover board in one scene.

A rapport of a different kind was created by the “baddies”, namely, the Wicked Witch of the Wood in the shape of Maureen Symonds and Linda Tester as Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother.  Both attracted sufficient boos to know they weren’t liked!  You could hear their dialogue as well.  Colin Wragg played the children’s Father who was really a “goodie”.

I enjoyed the Principal Girl and Boy, Alice Rose as Heidi and Niamh Rose as Martin with both having strong voices and a good presence on stage.  I also thought that the two young performers, Rosie Hodgeson (Hansel) and Charlotte Watson (Gretel), were very good and showed an encouraging amount of promise, although I didn’t think that ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story was right for them.  The roles were shared with Eve Holbrook and Erin Kalischer at some other performances.

I enjoyed the dancers who were from the Sarah-Louise Ashworth School of Dance.  As suggested earlier, the set was superb and constructed in-house and the costumes were great.  The sound was a bit wobbly at times (the Wicked Witch’s mike failed in her main song) but I’m sure it will have been corrected at other performances.  The Robot was an excellent innovation.

On occasions the dialogue was a bit laboured and I felt that several of the musical numbers, the vast majority of which were show tunes, could have been shortened.  Many of them would not have been familiar to the youngsters in the audience which was perhaps a shame.

The show ran for very nearly 3 hours, including the interval, and my view is that this is far too long for a panto.  However, the audience seemed to be with it throughout and went home in a happy frame of mind.

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