REVIEW: Alice in Wonderland, People’s Theatre, Newcastle
The People’s panto is certainly well named, I thought, as the people came streaming in for the opening performance of this year’s Alice in Wonderland.
With the place all but packed, the stage started filling too, this time with brightly attired bodies – some very tiny indeed - jiggling mostly in time to music.
Frantic waving from dark corners of the auditorium suggested there were connections between the bright young things on stage and the audience seemingly blown in by Storm Darragh.
Well, this will help to fund a few serious Studio dramas during the coming year, I thought, unwrapping a boiled sweet.
But panto’s a serious business. The programme names everyone involved in getting this year’s heartwarming, Darragh-defying production off the ground.
There are, literally, hundreds of them, including four rotating teams of ‘Juniors’ and ‘Babes’, a dozen student dancers and a seven-strong adult chorus. And that’s in addition to the creative team and principals!
Somewhere a director’s mentioned: Pamela Willis who must have had her work cut out!
And here was I among their extended families with no special person to wave to or applaud.
I applauded them all. This Alice in Wonderland, adapted by Tom Whalley from Lewis Carroll, and with extra bits by Alison Carr who also plays a mildly sardonic White Rabbit and is credited as part of the set-painting team (what a trouper!), is joyous, and lovely to look at too.
There are, of course, none of the jaw-dropping technical effects you’ll get at the big pro theatres, but the People’s company throws everything it has at this time-honoured nonsense tale, and it’s quite sufficient.
From the opening blast of Jabberwocky and the first appearance of dreamy Alice (winsomely played by Erin Hattrick), I was absorbed in her journey, following the perpetually late White Rabbit down that hole.
Even allowing for all the Christmas cracker jokes and those panto staples like the cooking and ghost scenes (reminder to self: they’re new to someone every year), the narrative thread stays strong.
We meet the lithe Cheshire Cat (Holly Chinneck, all in pink) and the dastardly Knave of Hearts (Cat White, who presumably couldn’t find a Dick Whittington to appear in).
The Knave, though bad, is glam, but not nearly as glam as The Duchess, Ian Willis doing sterling dame duties with an accent from north of the border.
Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are Ben Watkins and Callum Mawston, so perfectly coordinated in their fooling that you can believe they’ve been doing this all their working lives.
The same could be said of the tight musical trio above the stage, although maybe they actually have been.
But everyone mucks in. I don’t know what Robbie Close does for a day job, but it can’t be anything like this, playing Caterpillar cocooned within a tube of inflatable rings (brilliant!) – and I rather hope Knobby the Door isn’t to be the pinnacle of Lauren Allison’s am dram career.
Best of all I liked the Mad Hatter’s tea party. You can always tell when actors had fun in rehearsal and if Luke Newey wasn’t having fun as the MH, I’d cheerfully have eaten mine.
Too many – far, far too many – to mention by name. But all can take credit for this wonderfully silly festive caper.
Alice in Wonderland runs until Sunday, December 15. Tickets from the People’s Theatre box office.