Innovative fare for festiveseason? Oh, yes it is!
Gaiety’s Robin Hood is rich in colour, innovation and skilled performance
The producers of the Gaiety pantomime know how to grab your attention at the start of a show and they sure as hell know how to finish it. Pantos often just fizzle out into an audience singalong. This production turned on a rip-roaring finish with a sword fight between Robin and the wicked sheriff (Nicholas Grennell), complete with jumping on tables and swinging from a chandelier in the best (admittedly muted) Errol Flynn style. Then it launched into a song that involved each of the Merry Men in a snappy slapstick routine. It’s the sort of thing kids love.
The show opens dramatically with a drawbridge opening, a black and white image with lights flashing and the sheriff ’s soldiers marching out in formation, the women dressed in matching black wigs and uniforms, all looking like automatons geared for war, doing an unusual skilfully choreographed routine.
Another good aspect is that David Crowley’s Robin and Kate Gilmore’s Maid Marian are assured performers singing and acting, not just deadwood celebrities brought on for their good Some pantos lose their rhythm when they start priming the audience to boo, hiss and shout abuse. Inevitably there’s some of that at the beginning here, and the story then, as usual, sags a bit. Joe Conlan as Maid Marian’s mother is less of a wrap-around predatory Dame than usual, but he’s good at getting laughs from dialogue that isn’t always funny.
The show is at its best in the routines when characters are involved in physical humour, especially when singing some old standards, such as Oom-PahPah from Oliver! backed up by the fine corps of young dancers from the Billie Barry School.
Topical references are mercifully few, but the music should be toned down in places; there’s no point in having funny songs when the words are drowned. And the occasional sexual allusions should be almost invisible instead of being laboured.
All in all, it’s great fun.
‘Pantos often just fizzle out. This one turns on a rip-roaring finalé’