Beauty & the Beast
National Stadium, Dublin
★★★★☆
Dublin’s most interactive panto sends (costumed) wolves chasing through the stadium, demands constant participation from its youthful viewers and, in a coup de theatre, pulls all the fathers on to the stage to bust their best Chappell Roan moves. There will be dad dancing.
The TV presenter Alan Hughes has championed pantomime since the 1990s. For more than a decade his hugely popular Sammy Sausages character, a uniquely Dublin spin on Buttons, has had a perfect scene partner in Rob Murphy’s outrageous, trash-talking dame, Buffy.
This Beauty & the Beast is subtitled A Sammy & Buffy Adventure with good cause. This dynamic duo are the shiny Brown Thomas Christmas window of a well-oiled machine that includes the writer Karl Broderick (who is also Hughes’ coproducer), the director Simon Delaney and the musical director Ross O’Connor. A nimble chorus proves worthy of Paul Ryder’s ambitious choreography.
Using digitised backdrops and recorded songs, the enthusiastic cast power through the story and musical numbers, pausing only for loud exchanges. Kids are summoned to their feet, the audience is divided into competing singalong halves, and raucous cheers jolly every scene along. Kudos to the troupe for the great use of space; the production repeatedly sends characters running through the aisles of delighted and squealing customers.
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The Fair City actor Johnny Ward has a ball as the preening, gun-kissing Gascon, an unsolicited suitor for Belle, the book-reading heroine, who is played by the newcomer Caoileann Woodcock. The promising young actor beat more than 100 hopefuls to land the role. Her soaring duet with Susan McFadden, the West End and Celtic Woman star, is sensational.
The perennial panto problem of the drippy central romantic couple is ingeniously circumvented by a script that streamlines the Beast into a series of roars and storm-outs from Niall Sheehy – strops that recall Robert Pattinson’s disappearances in the first Twilight movie.
For all the wealth of experience on stage, some of the funniest moments come through corpsing, mistimed physical rolls, and wig slippage. This writer feared she would have to call paramedics for the row behind during an off-script sequence between Hughes and Murphy and, again, during banter between Murphy and, as Belle’s father, Will Morgan.
The production and costume design cleverly flirts with Disney’s animated version of the story while asserting its own rowdy identity.
On the bus ride home, younger audience members passionately re-enact scenes and songs. I can think of no higher recommendation.
Beauty & the Beast is at the National Stadium, Dublin 8, until Sunday, January 5th
