A MAGICAL TRIO FOR THE YOUNG AT HEART
The Worst Witch (Vaudeville Theatre) Verdict: Schoolgirl sorcery ★★★✩✩
The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (Ambassadors Theatre) Verdict: Entertaining angst ★★★★✩
Where Is Peter Rabbit? (Theatre Royal Haymarket) Verdict: Hopping merrily ★★★★✩
LONG before the existence of Hogwarts, there was Miss Cackle’s boarding school for witches.
Rather than a boy with special powers, in Jill Murphy’s books the heroine is a well-meaning duffer called Mildred, who arrived on the wrong bus and isn’t a witch at all by nature. Maybe boys like to feel their special powers more keenly.
Emma Reeves’s stage adaptation is set during a school play, though in the second act the girls tackle real villainy, as the sweet cardigan-wearing head becomes her own evil twin in a lurid cocktail frock. Good call: everybody likes to watch a headmistress going rogue.
Polly Lister gives it every shade between amiable ditherer and villainous old bat, sometimes wheeling round in an old-fashioned vaudeville profile split-costume, a trick which the young will not have seen yet.
The lovely thing, though, is that in the first half — since it’s a school play — the magic is all home-made: puppet-glove cats, and spectacular acrobatic trapeze-work as Danielle Bird’s Mildred and her friend (Rosie Abraham, veteran of Peter Pan Goes Wrong) get dangerously upended on swinging broomsticks.
But when the threat gets real, so does the magic, with niftier theatrical tricks from an artfully wonky set and good use of the auditorium. Exciting, too: when Agatha the evil fake headmistress roamed the audience a small hand stole into mine from the child next to me.
n AS CYNICISM grows, over-12s can turn to Adrian Mole, in the musical adaptation of Sue Townsend’s tale of a Leicester teenager in the Thatcher era. His dysfunctional family and hopeless love for haughty Pandora come alive with lively pop rock tunes: for all the angst it is funny, pleasantly daft and energetic.
Adrian’s gorgeously pompous pronouncements on the mad adult world are given dropdead timing (credit to the director) and the child actors — three take the lead in turns as Adrian and his mates — are all tremendous.
So are the adults: Andrew Langtree and a willowy Amy
Ellen Richardson are the awful parents, Ian Talbot is old Baxter with his retro views on women, and Rosemary Ashe a fierce grandmother. They all double as children, which is a simple trick, but hilarious.
MEANWHILE, the smallest children and their gentle grandparents can head to the grand Theatre Royal Haymarket, and a loving, puppet-rich take on Beatrix Potter.
Stephen Edis wrote the music and Alan Ayckbourn some lyrics: Joanna Brown tells an hour of tales, hardly needing the recorded voices of Griff Rhys Jones or Myleene Klass because we’re all riveted by witty puppetry.
Apart from Peter, top marks for Mrs Tiggywinkle’s snuffling nose, Samuel Knight’s smelly Tommy Brock the badger, and some sharply synchronised beak-work from the Puddleducks.