Charming Charlie is a panto prince
CHARLIE STEMP has been leading a charmed life: Broadway with Bette Midler and Bernadette Peters, and next up, Prince Charming in pantomime at the London Palladium.
Stemp, who won rave notices for his Arthur Kipps in Half A Sixpence at Chichester Festival Theatre and the Noel Coward, has also been picked by Cameron Mackintosh and Richard Eyre to play Bert in Mary Poppins next autumn.
The actor was in the last Palladium panto, Dick Whittington, with Elaine Paige, Emma Williams and star regulars Julian Clary, Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers and Gary Wilmot.
And he’s back at the Palladium from December 8 in Snow White, alongside Dawn French, the ‘regulars’ and Danielle Hope, in the title role.
‘They’re comedy geniuses,’ Stemp said of French, Clary, Zerdin, Havers and Wilmot.
He added that working on Whittington helped hone his comic chops.
‘I was just really happy — no matter what they did to me,’ he said, bursting into laughter as he recalled some of the comical moments the cast got him into.
‘It’s sometimes just as much fun to be the butt of the joke as the person telling it. I loved it,’ he said of his time hanging out with Paige and her panto ratpack (he and Paige have remained pals).
Stemp’s always had a soft spot for pantos. When he was growing up, ‘the only theatre we could afford to go to was the local panto’ (at the Orchard Theatre in Dartford, Kent).
Snow White has so far sold a staggering 100,000 seats for its five-week run, taking nearly £6 million.