Shrek

Shrek is a big musical and for any society to take this on, they need to have a fairly decent membership to be able to cope with all the rigors of this show and its pressures on the characters.

Huddersfield Light Opera Company need have no worries about staging this show as they had all the ingredients to be able to do it justice, the chorus members of this show are not able to sit back and leave all the action to the principal roles as they all double up to be the Fairy Tale characters such as The Gingerbread Man, Pinocchio, The Sugar Plum Fairy and many others, in fact there are 22 Fairy Tale characters in all.

All the members of this society worked extremely well together to give the final product much to the delight of the audience which contained many children on the evening I attended, all laughing and giggling in the right places.

Anyone who has seen Shrek knows the actions starts with the young Shrek being sent on his way by his parents to live his own life, this is also true of the young Fiona too, in these parts we saw Lexi Pygott and Mia Hopkins playing the young Shrek and Fiona respectively and both were able to deliver a great performance.

The four main characters of this piece are of course Shrek himself, Fiona, Donkey and Lord Farquaad and any society planning on presenting this show needs to make sure they have some larger-than-life actors’ character wise to play these four.

I will start with maybe not the largest of the characters, talking stature-wise, Lord Farquaad which was in the more than capable hands of Robin Walsh who was able to get every ounce of humour out of his part. I particularly loved his scene when he rode on to the stage on a “plastic” horse, this was hilarious as he entered, dismounted and then reversed off the stage again complete with “beeps”, the audience and I laughed all the way through this scene. I’m not sure if I could ever play this part as you have to “walk” on your knees all the way through the show, but Robin coped with this like an expert.

In this piece we see Fiona as she grows up into the character we all know and love, I have already mentioned the young Fiona played by Mia Hopkins and she was joined by Teen Fiona played by Isabelle Barker and the adult Fiona played by Holly Comber-Moccia. All three actors joined forces in the number “I Know It’s Today” which tells their story, all three were able to sing their part with confidence.

Of course Fiona does much more than sing with her counterparts, she also works all the way through the show interacting with the other main characters of this show and Holly did this with conviction to ensure everyone knew exactly who she was, her duet with Shrek “I Think I got you Beat” where they try to out do each other by breaking wind and burping went down a storm with the younger members of the audience, and I have to say some older ones too. Holly has a beautiful voice which we all loved.

One of the other main characters is of course Donkey and here we had Dom Moccia who was superb and managed to get everything from this part, however, not only was Dom able to show his comedic abilities he also has a fine singing voice which he put to good use in “Travel Song” with the main character. Everyone loved Donkey and Dom managed to capture all the characteristics of this part including a near perfect Southern Drawl.

And now we come to the title role, the big man himself, Shrek, who needs an actor who may not be quite as big in stature but has big in personality, well here we had Martin Stead who was absolutely perfect in every way. He held his near perfect Scottish accent all the way through the production and portrayed the massive personality needed to not only play but to actually be Shrek. His comic timing was superb and although it must have been very difficult to work with the cumbersome costume and make up, Martin did brilliantly. I read in the programme it takes 2 hours to apply Martin’s prosthetics and make up plus another 1 hour to remove it all which is pure dedication to his art.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this production.

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