TICKET sales had gone up for New Pantomime Productions’ 15th year at the Grand Opera House even before Blue Genie pulled the plug on Dick Whittington at York Barbican.
It would appear the new rival on York’s commercial panto block has been seen off after only a year. Indirectly, that gives director Simon Barry carte blanche to carry on as he always has, serving up the same old pantomime antics rather than responding to reviewers’ charges of a need to do more than that.
What Barry does do is pick his casts well. He picked most of this one for the same show last winter at the Portsmouth suburb of Southsea, where Adele Silva deputised for fellow Emmerdale soap star Lisa Riley for a fortnight and now she reprises her regal-bitch role as Snow White’s evil stepmother, Queen Malevola, with feisty resolve.
Indeed the team are so familiar with each other, they temporarily slipped back to Southsea on Monday night with an accidental reference to Southampton – in a case of coasting it – before recovering their panto satnav and re-locating the eggs being well beaten gag to Leeds United.
This may have highlighted the Can You Spot The Difference? nature of Barry’s shows but Aiden J Harvey dug them out of the hole mighty quickly. This goofy-toothed Seventies’ impressionist and retro north country comedian is this panto’s safe pair of hands, back on familiar ground at the Opera House after a year’s absence for his eighth show.
His jokes are very familiar too: he is still doing his politically incorrect mockery of the Chinese mangling of the English language; his ping-pong-ball-on-his-nose gag; and his Prince Charles, Muhammad Ali and Ray Winstone impersonations. And he still laughs at his own jokes, but so do the children, who bond like glue with his cheeky cheerfulness and ageless silliness.
Barry makes a canny North Yorkshire choice in his new addition to his Snow White squad, bringing in Norton actress Lauren Hood. Principal parts in national tours of Hairspray and Grease and the title role in The Rise And Fall of Little Voice at Hull Truck affirmed her stage pedigree and she brings a bonniness to her Snow White, working equally well with the principals, the seven dwarfs and young ensemble playing woodland creatures. Her rendition of Somewhere Only We Know, in the style of Lily Allen’s wintry cover version, is the show’s singing peak.
That is one of the rare up-to-date moments, along with a Nigella Lawson gag involving a snow white powder, and as ever you wish for more, particularly as Barry’s cast looks well up for being stretched more. In particular, Phil Randall’s dame, Sarah Spoilit the Cook, has far more about him/her than mere costumes, and Marcus Patrick finds plenty of knowing humour in sending up his Hollyoaks hunk persona as the handsome Huntsman and both could go further still.
Rob McVeigh loosens up steadily but pleasingly as Prince Valentine, having had to sing without any character introduction, and truly hits his stride in the manic slapstick mayhem of the Twelve Days Of Christmas, now a permanent fixture to go with the metronomic ghost scene.
Belly-flopping Max Laird, Karen Anderson Laird and Denise Dove are on affable dwarf duty, while Amy Jane Williams’s choreography and Chris Hocking’s musical direction both have plenty of vitality. As ever, the sets are perfunctory, but there is more character about this Grand Opera House panto than is often the case and children find it a scream.
Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, Grand Opera House, York, until January 5 2014. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york
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