Despite the fact my leg is purple and bruised from where the sun don't shine to below my knee, it's not as painful as it has been - and what better way to take my mind off it than our annual pilgrimage to the glittering London Palladium for the panto [in its very last weekend]? Oh, yes we did!
Panto has a long, long history in the UK, arising as it did from myriad sources including Medieval mummers' plays, troubadours, jesters and the European "Harlequin and Pierrot" masques, through taverns and music halls to the traditional tongue-in-cheek ribald comedy shows we know today. It stands alone amongst other "variety show" traditions, however, as being an event for all the family - the ever-present near-the-knuckle double-entendres being included for the adults, but with enough fairy-tale enchantment, colour, flashes, bangs, audience participation and spectacle for the little 'uns, to disguise the essentially smutty nature of the humour on offer. When I read supposedly "outraged" reports in the papers about parents walking out of this year's production with their kiddies because of all the alleged "filth", I continue to despair, in this day and age when just about every thick twat on social media is seeking attention for attention's sake and whose opinion is of no consequence whatsoever to anyone with a brain, as to why tabloids no longer employ real journalists - rather than people paid to gather the most "clickbait" bits off Tw*tter, Reddit or F**book and pass them off as if it were a real story...
I digress. This year it was the turn of Sleeping Beauty to get the Palladium/Michael Harrison/Crossroads Pantomimes treatment - and in its tenth year [a milestone they endlessly, somewhat tiresomely at times, kept reminding us about throughout the show] of similar spectacles, the old stalwarts were all lined up to appear again - dear old Nigel Havers, ventriloquist Paul Zerdin, host/"continuity" Rob Madge and, of course, the centre of it all, the peerless Julian Clary.
Again, there was a guest star to get the "bums on seats" [past "guest turns" have included Paul O'Grady, Elaine Paige, Lee Mead, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Janine Duvitski, Beverley Knight, Donny Osmond(!) and Jane McDonald] - this time, to our joy, it was Catherine Tate!
And again - inevitably - there was a mere nod to what scarcely resembled a "story"; Princess Aurora (whose name Julian as "the King", despite being ostensibly and unbelievably her biological father, never gets right, played by Emily Lane) is cursed by the villainous "Carabos" (Miss Tate) to prick her finger, sleep for a hundred years, and only be awoken by a kiss from her "true love" - the very hunky (especially when he and the chorus dancers get stripped down to their undies for the number Splish Splash) "Handsome Prince" Amonik Melaco, and they all live happily ever after. Ten minutes' worth of plot. That does need quite some padding-out - and that, dear reader, its what makes a show!
Indeed, of all the reviews I've read [and they are a mixed bag of good and bad], perhaps a fellow blogger, Yank in London Kara Dennison summed it up most succinctly:
"...there’s a story we all know, and there is a central title character, but really we’re all here to see a big group of very specific talents show off. The plot is secondary, perhaps even tertiary....There was no plot, the skits barely hung together with each other by a thread, and I had a great time."
Amen to that.
It was flimsy, it was basically a succession of variety-show numbers welded together in an effort to make a show out of nothing, and it did sometimes give the impression everything was about to fall about at the seams [although - as I have been reading from reviews from different stages during the run about similar "hiccups" to what we saw - this was all probably carefully scripted]] - but we had a bloody good evening's entertainment nonetheless! [In spite of the whole thing being interrupted and having to stop for a good fifteen minutes last night, when there was shouting from the stalls - which we immediately took for some kind of demo - that, as it turned out, was someone calling for help because an old lady in the audience had collapsed.]
The sets were utterly amazing. The dramatic end to the first half - where gigantic (inflatable) thorned vines expanded from ceiling, walls and orchestra pit to fill the entire vast auditorium (representing the bit in the fairy story where the sleeping princess is hidden behind a thicket of brambles) - was phenomenal. The choreography, and all the dancers, were excellent. The costumes - in particular, of course, our star Julian Clary's - were dazzlingly brilliant!
The "other guest star", impressionist John Culshaw (as "the King's private detective"), added some variety to the show, taking on Donald Trump, Kier Starmer and others, including Julian himself, which was very amusing. Julian was every bit as outré as we expected - even if the scripts this year gave him even less to work with as we may have hoped. His relationship with the ever-willing "foil" Nigel Havers - in particular a late-in-the-show duet - worked well. Mr Havers himself got a funny part of his own, in a parody of the Evita "balcony moment" [NB in the recent Palladium production, Rachel Zegler sang Don't Cry For Me Argentina every night from the theatre's balcony overlooking Argyll Street]. The inevitable comedy "four-performers-in-a-line-sing-a-manic-song-with-props" routine, a panto staple, was hilarious.
However it was Catherine Tate who [despite initial "protestations"] brought her audience favourite character "Nan" (among others) to the stage - first in a song-and-dance routine to Don't Stop Me Now and then in a brilliant tongue-twister routine based on the classic I'm not a pheasant plucker - really stole the show, and got the biggest round of applause of the entire evening.
Including the curtain call finale...
In spite of its faults, this was a genuinely fun evening, of that there is no doubt!
Same time, next year? Oh, yes, we will!
