Hansel & Gretel

 

Due to a recent NODA boundary reorganisation, I found myself at Needingworth Village Hall seeing Wellworth Players for the first time putting on their annual pantomime, which this year was a home written production of Hansel and Gretel. So, first of all a warm welcome to District 2.

The whole show was written and directed by the Dame of the show, Chris Thompson. However, hats off to the man, that wasn’t supposed to be the case, as the original dame was taken ill a couple of weeks before the show was due to open and Chris stepped up to take over the part. Ok, he wrote it and would have been more familiar with the script than anybody else, but taking on a pivotal role at such notice was a brave move and I would never have known if I hadn’t been told. Bravo!

The seventies built village hall at Needingworth was originally designed with badminton in mind and offers no inbuild performing facilities, so a huge effort has to be made to import lighting , sound, stage and scenery and under the expert direction of the Stage Manager, who goes by the wonderful name of ‘Boggle,’ Assistant Stage Manager Charlotte Bruce and Backstage Darren Seekings, it took a crew of twenty four to put it together, a Herculean task in man management alone! And what a superb job they did too.  The set was a classic painted panto set in mainly bright primary colours depicting an excellent village scene, including a boot the Dame lived in, a forest scene, and Griselda’s house complete with a cage and a double oven in which to cook captive small children! So well done indeed also to all involved and especially scenery artists Becky and Jeremy Bays. All other scenes were played to front of the tabs.

Lighting, by Jonny Thompson, Graham Emmett and Darren Seekings, which again had to be rigged from scratch including installing the lighting bar itself, complimented the set and illuminated the well painted flats perfectly.  Regarding sound, which was mostly crystal it was nice to see that Wellworth Players are yet to discover face mics and actually know how to project, sadly a dying art in am dram circles these days. So well done everybody especially the younger actors. My aging ears appreciated it!

Costumes were very well chosen by Karen Bays, Maria Quick and Felicity Leonard, fitting into the background of bright scenery very well indeed. And as for the OTT Dame costumes, I think we should all have been issued with dark glasses. Absolutely splendid stuff!!

Musical Director Roger Billington and his assistant Cyril Hodgson picked an excellent selection of songs for this show from: “You Two” “Consider Yourself”, and “Uptown Funk” to “Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty” and “We Built This City” amongst others. I do however feel some of the choral songs could have done with choreographing, as the dance numbers were a little old fashioned and often out of step with each other and even the cast clapping along was at times out of time with actors doing very much their own thing. There was however one highlight in the dancing when young Gordon Russell playing a Fox/Child put on his own superb display of exuberant modern dancing, which raised the roof with the audience.

The two youngsters playing the title roles, Jamie Medlicott as Hansel and Matilda Spark as Gretel were very confident and convincing in their characterisation, Nice job kids!

Chris Thompson played the Dame part and the audience to the hilt, remarkable considering the circumstances. His delivery of the jokes was sublime, with all the traditional belly laughs and groans you would expect. The jokes in this script were really good at times and we all regularly roared.

We had not one good fairy but three, Katie Hughes, Julie Gill and Marie Quick, whose casting appeared to represent three generations of fairies sprinkling fairy dust and explaining the story as we went along.

We also had not one set of traditional pantomime village idiots, but two sets with the Dame’s Henchmen of Jago Pearson as Ben and Phil Bailey as Billy. And on the evil side we had the two incompetent assistants to our villain Grisela, Karen Bays as Rough and Ann Lister as Toothless, leading of course to lots of incompetent tom foolery.

Add to that two talking trees, Treeburt (Keir Sims) and Oakley (Abi Pearson) whose ability to stand stock still in awkward positions for long periods was impressive, So you could say you had three pairs.  

The King played by Simon West played it as more one of the lads rather than as a regal manner which led to him being regularly insulted, to much merriment.

The outstanding character in this show was definitely Francesca Mann as evil baddy Griselda with her manic laughter, whose performance didn’t take prisoners, stamping her authority all over the script.  Loved it!

Mark Hebert played the King’s Chamberlain and a very funny interactive radio commentator in a very original slapstick scene, where our Dame was taking instructions from a radio cookery programme when the programme was changed to soccer training by the henchmen when she was out of the room leading to a comedic warming up routine and kicking the cooking ingredient all over the stage. Excellent writing!

Other characters included Geoff Durrant as Johann, Maggie Redgrave as a Flower Seller and Mary Chapman as a villager. And then we had a lovely lineup of youngsters in face masks playing various children and animals, Trinity Clarke as Dodger, Diana Clarke as a Squirrel, Oliver Buchanan as Badger, Gordon Russell as Fox and Eleanor Stevenson as a Deer.

Opening nights are not the best time to critic a show as they need time to bed in, So, with that in mind, I did find this show started off promisingly but did tail off towards the end, there were pauses in the action which lost some pace, and a couple of scenes which didn’t really work for me, Also, the kids with mops scene had a major problem. I was later told there was an emergency backstage where one of the children couldn’t go on stage leaving one short and the prompt took over to cover the incident. Good quick thinking, but at the time I didn’t really understand what was happening. However, the brilliant Gordon Russell refusing to take part and pick up his mop up certainly was a saving grace. Good uplifting finishing number though.

So well done to writer/ director Chris Thompson and his army of helpers, a very entertaining opening visit to Wellworth Players. We look forward to your October production. 

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