Theatre reviews: Cinderella: A Fairytale | Mary Doll Poppins
The Lyceum’s festive offering finds it feet after a pedestrian first half, says Joyce McMillan
At the Lyceum, in recent years, it’s been all about avoiding pantomime cliches, and doing something different for Christmas. The results have often been a shade lacking, in both showbiz pizazz and midwinter magic; and for a while, in the first half, it looks as if this year’s Cinderella – A Fairytale is heading in the same direction.
Written by top English director Sally Cookson and Adam Peck, with the show’s original 2011 Bristol performing company, Cinderella – A Fairytale takes an unseasonal approach to the story, singing as it opens of springtime and melting snows, and framing its heroine Ella as the daughter of a widowed bird-lover dad who teacher her to love all the birds of the forest around their house.
Vividly-coloured puppet birds swoop around the stage on sticks manipulated in highly visible style by members of the cast; and in Francis O’Connor’s set, appear to inhabit a bedraggled forest made entirely of ladders, brushes, mops and buckets, an idea that references Ella’s future fate as a household drudge, but puzzlingly contradicts the emotional logic of a story where the birds and forest provide the counterbalance to that fate.
The grown-up Cinderella, played with spirit and gentleness by Olivia Hemmati, duly appears, along with her ghastly new stepmother and horrible bullying step-siblings; but while she talks to herself a lot, she never speaks to the audience to enlist us in her cause, or introduces us by name to the gorgeous bird her dead Dad sends to help her.
After the interval, though – as if treated to a half-time talk by Steve Clarke himself – Jemima Levick’s company emerge in palpably different mood; and led by Sam Stopford’s shy but beguiling bird-watching Prince, and Nicole Cooper’s formidably sexy cougar of a stepmother, they begin to engage with the audience in fine style.
So there’s booing and cheering and singing and dancing and a truly terrible dog costume, as the nine-strong company gradually draw us into the heart of a tale that ends in true Brothers Grimm style, with Mother chopping off Sister’s toes to make her foot fit Ella’s glittery trainer. “There’s blood in the shoe!” trill the ever-helpful birds; and true love finally prevails, to loud cheers from an audience who sound both delighted and relieved to have been offered some real panto magic, at last.
At Oran Mor, by contrast, there’s no question of genre around the annual festive show. This is full-on Glasgow panto at its fruitiest and most satirical, designed for Oran Mor’s grown-up lunchtime audience; and this year, writer and director Martin McCormick rolls out a beezer of a script in Mary Doll Poppins, a Weegie take on PL Travers’s much-loved Edwardian tale of a magical nanny sent to sort out an unhappy bourgeois family.
Here, though, the location is upwardly mobile 21st century Partick, where Neil John Gibson’s adorable panto-dame Poppins flies in to take charge of Caris and Harris, the children of a full-blown management bully and capitalist nightmare called Atholl.
The show struggles a little with the petite scale of its five-strong cast, which obliges Carmen Pieraccini to play both Mum and Dad, sometimes simultaneously; and perhaps understandably, given these pressures, she sometimes forgets, at first, to make Atholl funny, or even boo-able.
By and large, though, the show rollicks on in brilliant style, full of hilarious new versions of the classic Mary Poppins songs – “just a moothful of Buckie/ Keeps Glasgow pure gallus” they carol, instead of A Spoonful of Sugar. And if it seems a shame to drop the usual final song sheet for a perfunctory chorus earlier in the action, that’s an absence the Oran Mor audience is likely to forgive; as they cheer on a cracker of a show that has already sold out two performances a day, from now until New Year, and beyond.
Cinderella: A Fairytale is at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 3 January; Mary Doll Poppins is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 4 January
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