The Little Mermaid

As with all pantomimes we have the good overcoming the bad in this case the evil sea-witch Octavia (Viv Morris) planned to steal Neptune’s trident and use its power to overthrow him and rule the world. Meanwhile, Prince Valiant (Hannah Sullivan) has decided to seek adventure on the high sea, but his ship hits a rock and sinks. Fortunately, all onboard are saved by Fairy Seaweed (Sue Perry), including fishmonger Sybil Sushi (Dom Bunten)and her son Winkle (David White). Valiant sees and hears the beautiful Arial (Summer Barrow), the daughter of Neptune singing, they meet and, of course, fall in love. However, Octavia wants Valiant for herself and hatches a plan that sees Arial give her voice away to her. Just as Octavia looks to have won, Sybil and co ride to the rescue, with a cunning plan conceived by Fairy Seaweed.

This show certainly lived up to HATS’ known reputation for beautiful costumes. Everyone looked splendid and particular congratulations on the mermaid costumes. The settings designed by Director (and Neptune) Gary Sander were good. There were some lovely touches such as the shells and the fish on the proscenium arch and the seagulls “flying” over the docks and the sea. There were 14 scenes overall which, of course, meant many scene changes. This slowed things down somewhat and I wonder why the script didn’t offer the opportunity for some of Octavia and Seaweed’s pieces to be done front of tabs on the splendid steps whilst some scene changes were carried out.

The twenty plus cast were kept busy and even those in the Ensemble were called upon to take on small roles. The Company numbers were, in the main, well done although with so many on a small stage it gave little opportunity to execute much movement and one or two of the numbers came over as rather under rehearsed. However, there was some lovely singing particularly from Summer Barnes and Hannah Sullivan. Hannah also played the guitar. David White (Winkle) too gave rein to his inner Freddie Mercury as well as supporting his ‘mum’ Sybil Sushi.

The young principal members of the cast did well with particularly fine performances from Arial and Valiant. Dom Bunten worked hard as Sybil Sushi ably supported by Eleanor Vaughan as his assistant Hazel and Viv Morris as Octavia managed to rise above the boos and heckling from some of the younger members of the audience well. Mentioning individual cast members is always a hostage to fortune but suffice to say that everyone gave of their personal best.

It was lovely to see HATS back on stage after two years and the almost full house showed that their loyal local supporters agreed. Thank you for inviting me to join HATS for the trip “under the sea” with Arial, The Little Mermaid

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