It's camp and it's noisy, it's tense and it's a hoot. Catherine Foleywatched the Snow White rehearsal from the wings. Oh yes she did

There's a tingle of excitement in the air. Rehearsals for this year's Snow White pantomime are in full swing. Michelle McGrath, in her Snow White costume, with pillar-box red lips and storybook eyes, looks as if she has stepped right out of the Disney movie. Her gorgeous Prince Charming waits in the wings about to don a double-breasted red tunic with gold buttons. In the background, ascending scales are played on a piano and the panto's musical director, Ross O'Connor, introduces a key change. As the notes soar, the excitement and tension go up a notch. Silk rustles, as costumes in primary colours are pulled out from suit carriers. For a second, there's a distinct crackle of magic.

The cast go through their lines, comic sequences and musical numbers in a series of rooms at a city centre rehearsal space. As the clock ticks and opening night draws closer, dance routines are run through. They begin, "and again from the top", to the music of Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head. Meanwhile, as if in counterpoint, You Can't Stop the Beat, from the film Hairspray, plays away upstairs in another room. "You have to have A, B and C steps in it. The kids know the latest moves from the videos," says Debbie Kiernan, the show's choreographer.

The pace quickens and the actors try to rein in their giddiness and their giggles. The cast "feed off the adrenalin", says Karl Broderick, who wrote and co-produced the panto with Alan Hughes. All around there are bursts of movement and prima donna-like sashays as star characters go through their paces. Joe Conlan, who plays Dame Buffy, is pulling on an unruly dayglo green wig. "Gwaney!" he says, wiggling his hips as he gets into character. "This year my character is a fashion designer. I've a sister called Coco but we don't really get on."

Dressed in drag, the character of Buffy has become a regular feature, as has Sammy Sausages, played by Hughes. The children come to see Sammy, but "the mammies and daddies, they all come out to see Buffy," says Conlan proudly, adding that each year there has been a fascination with his legs. He claims he is "the only man in Ireland who is a panto dame, like Jimmy O'Dea, Milo O'Shea and Jack Cruise of yore. Now they don't have that. Years ago the principal boy was a girl."

In the tradition of panto, Conlan and Hughes camp it up deliberately and their arrival on stage each year is usually acknowledged by the crowd in the true panto style with uproarious hoots and cheers. It's the essence of commedia dell'arte, which was all about overacting and campness, as the panto's director Daryn Crosbie explains.

Conlan says he learned his comic timing and delivery over many years working in the Gaiety theatre alongside Maureen Potter and later with Twink. "This is my eighth panto with this company [ Anthem Productions]. I did about 14 in the Gaiety. Nothing prepares you for the reality of it. The best learning is working with people".

Having grown up in Cuffe Lane in the south inner city, he explains that the Dame Buffy character allows "this Dublinese" humour to come out from "tanx a thousand" to "right Mrs Queen, sorry Mrs Queen."

"And [ Buffy] likes the daddies," he adds cheekily. Picking on adult members of the audience to the delight of their children is all part of the character's appeal. "You're so delicious, I could spread you on a cracker. Look at the muckles on him. Do you do the rugby?"

Crosbie adds that this is part of the show's appeal: "We like to humiliate the daddies. The kids love to see their parents squirming . . . It's all about audience participation. It's all to do with the kids."

This panto is "very traditional", he explains. "We do have a male impersonating a dame", and the characters of Buffy and Sammy are "fitted into the storyline, the audience is expecting to see those." "I try to make it as entertaining for the adults as the children," says Karl Broderick. "It's good and evil and the boundaries are not mixed. They are very different and you know there will be a happy ending and I think kids love to see their parents laughing. You can see them looking up at them laughing and you see parents looking at their kids laughing." The show will play to approximately 30,000 people this season. "Once it gets going, it's like a steam train."

Linda Martin, who plays the Evil Queen Malaria, is pleased she can terrify children so thoroughly. "I can scowl quite easily," she says, smiling at the idea of this unusual talent. "I have this expression when I enter that it looks like I'm scowling. I have to scowl. I'm far from stern, I hope, but I have to glare at them." "The kids love a baddie," agrees Conlan.

Martin is a formidable evil queen. Two years ago, she played the scene-stealing wicked stepmother in the company's production of Cinderella. She recalls the excitement of being brought as a child to the panto in Belfast's Opera House by her grandparents. "We didn't sleep for the week beforehand." The magic of panto "must be that the story books, bedtime stories, are appearing in real life," she says, "when you suddenly see these characters . . . Maybe it's fantasy come to life and it's so harmless and it's so easy for kids to associate with. They boo and hiss and shout at you."

After years of performing with a band, she says, "what threw me was that you are calling the shots, you are talking, and then suddenly you have to wait to be fed a line. I found that very alien. It was a learning curve." Then in a flash, she dons the scowl and stomps to the front of the stage to glare some more and cast spells. The urge to boo and hiss is almost irresistible.

But then American actor Kyle Kennedy, who plays the handsome prince in this year's panto, walks across the floor with great pomposity and the story progresses. "I'm Prince Troy . . . I come from a far-off land," he declares with a flourish. On the night, there will be a fanfare. "He's from Florida," interjects Hughes, going off script.

Sammy Sausages, played by Hughes, is "the all-round good guy who is friends with everybody and saves the day". As Hughes explains: "He's the one who is always joking with the kids, he wins them over very early." This is the 11th panto he has produced with his partner Broderick.

"It's just great fun. It introduces kids to live entertainment for the first time," says Hughes, who presents Ireland AM on TV3 when he is not treading the boards. "You see the kids, they are going to be terrified, and they just love it, calling 'Look behind you' and it's all that interaction. Some days when schools are in, you can't hear yourself think." He says that the audiences "from three to 83-year-olds get totally caught up in it".

The show, with a cast of 25 youngsters, eight adult dancers and seven principals, costs more than €300,000 to produce. Broderick says that putting the show on, from renting the theatre and the rehearsal space to hiring the director, choreographer, musical director, stage manager and assistants, lighting designer, sound designer and operators to getting the props and costumes, "really is a huge machine but the best job in the world".

Meanwhile, rehearsals continue. Sammy is telling Buffy she should be locked up. The irrepressible Dame Buffy answers by wagging her finger and singing the Amy Winehouse line: "They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, no, no, no." Even Crosbie, the earnest director with a show to get ready, can't help but crack a smile.

• The Cheerios Panto, Snow White, opens on Mon, Dec 17, with previews from Fri at Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin 1. The show runs until Sun, Jan 27. Booking: 01-8721122