Sleeping Beauty

An important facet of pantomime is to involve the audience in the story and that certainly happened here. There were moments where the children in the audience (and at this performance they were in the majority) were actively involved in what was happening on stage. The ‘it’s behind you’ was deafening. This must have been music to the ears of the cast. This company has a first class Dame in Jonathan Edwards but unfortunately the script didn’t give him much of an opportunity to demonstrate his skills as Nanny Nora. The wicked fairy (Carabosse) played by Julie Hunter extracted plenty of boos from the audience together with her sidekick a clever robotic raven in the tower. Her counterpart The Fairy Queen (Linda Askew) elicited plenty of cheers when dealing with Carabosse.  The romance was in the hands of Princess Aurora (Vicky Evans) and Prince Michael (Louise Hewitt) and they worked well together both in acting and in song.  The comedy pairing of Brian Washington (King Septimus) and Sarah Diamond (Queen Sybil) worked well and Brett Dewsbury was an energetic Barney the jester. There were good cameo roles from Matthew Ralphs, Steve Thornhill and Alex Bagott as the three suitors and their lack of success in pursuing Aurora was registered in a clever take off of X-Factor. The three fairies portrayed by Danielle Beere, Molly Flint and Megan Abrahams looked and sounded delightful as they presented their gifts to the baby princess.

The singing by the principals and chorus was very good and I particularly liked the rendering of Gary Barlow’s Jubilee Song at the end.

The whole production was backed up by some excellent costumes and an extremely good set.

Well done to all involved!

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.