Sleeping Beauty

I always accept with great pleasure the invitation from NOMADS to see their pantomime and they never fail to entertain me, and with this year’s choice of Alan P Frayn’s Sleeping Beauty, they did it again!  

The twenty-six strong cast worked well together and looked as if they were enjoying every moment, and that came over the footlights. The goodies and the baddies were all there and on great form.  

Steven Beach's portrayal of Nurse Dottie Dettol was great - he is an excellent dame and always gives great enjoyment to the audience; and the effervescent Colin Scott was great fun in the part of Muddles - he manages tremendous interaction with the audience.  

Lori Cosner as Good Fairy Lilac was suitably sparkly and Sarah Smith as Bad Witch Hazel produced such a loud and scary cackle I feared for her vocal chords!  However, they were both just right in their roles.

Princess Rose aka Sleeping Beauty (Laura Jolley) and Emily Bowman as Prince Alexis (the whole hub of the story) added great value with their performances.  Both have superb voices which complemented each other extremely well.  

There was some great teamwork between Pam Daish and Karen Thorp as Fetch and Carry.  I much enjoyed the sack of post skit which was very well done indeed.

Good support was given by Andy McGowan and Teresa Baron as the king and queen and the four Rainbow Fairies (Emily Gleed, Alice Hare, Fatos Inal-Falls and Sophie Maguire) did well although I would have liked a little more projection from them vocally.

As always the well rehearsed chorus added to the whole thing with some excellent singing and dancing    The settings were good and the thorny growth over the castle was well created giving Prince Alexis a great opportunity for an Indiana Jones moment.  Lighting and effects were also very good and worked spot on cue.  Costumes were, as always, colourful and well thought out, due to the excellent wardrobe team led by Sarah Smith. 

This Sleeping Beauty was a beauty of a pantomime mainly due to NOMADS’ professional approach.  The team of Jamie Maguire, Elliott Papworth, Jess Clifford and Simon Pearce as director, co director Choreographer and Musical Director put a solid pantomime together this year.  As always we were provided with a good evening of family entertainment - give or take a double entendre! 

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