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Cinderella

Published Friday 12 December 2008 at 11:00 by Heather Neill

The credit crunch provides a couple of jokes in Susie McKenna’s script, but there is no stinting on the glitz and glitter in Wimbledonia. Plenty of the expected ingredients are here too, including a couple of outrageously coiffed and costumed Ugly Sisters and a Fairy Godmother (Louise Dearman) who can sing as well as wield the clonking couplets.

But this panto is no slave to tradition. Cinderella speaks in rhyme only with the fairy, wondering aloud why she’s doing so, and she quickly pronounces Prince Charming “lush”. But then he is Gareth Gates (the flutter of pre-teen hearts is almost audible) and she is Joanna Page of Gavin and Stacey fame. There are dancing “villagers” but no front of cloth singalong and, in a daring departure, the Fairy Godmother opts to be Baroness Hardup.

Page is daintily pretty without being twee and, best of all, she’s decidedly Welsh. Which gives Alistair McGowan, as her father Baron Hardup, his first excuse for an accent not his own - if she’s Welsh, he’d better be too. Television references are now traditional, so how clever to shoe-horn in everyone from Dot Cotton to Simon Cowell in the person of the impressionist Baron.

Graham Hoadley and Andrew Ryan as Lavinia and Lucinda (Lav and Lu, naturally) make a wonderfully garish pair of step-sisters, attending Prince Charming’s ball as a Christmas pudding and a snowball. And Ronn Lucas as Buttons is a simply brilliant ventriloquist. Scorch the Dragon and Buffalo Billy are his usual side-kicks, but a dad called Stuart was a signable stand-in “dummy” on press night.

The singing is sometimes patchy and the comedy car sequence not funny enough, but otherwise this is magical seasonal entertainment.

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