Santa’s adorable ... and Jo Brand is positively wicked
Miracle On 34th Street (Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool) Verdict: That’s the spirit! ★★★★✩ Snow White (Richmond Theatre, Surrey) Verdict: Jo Brand does festive penance ★★★✩✩
ON THE window of the Liverpool Football Club shop near Merseyside’s Playhouse Theatre there’s a message from manager Jurgen Klopp: ‘It’s the season to believe.’
Klopp’s right as usual. We could all do with a bit of old-fashioned Christmas spirit. And that’s what Gemma Bodinetz offers, with her delightful production of this musical, based on the 1947 movie.
It’s the paradoxical tale of a Manhattan working mum who’s trained her daughter not to believe in Santa Claus. ‘I don’t believe in anything I can’t see, smell, taste or touch,’ the daughter insists firmly. That is, until she meets cuddly Kris Kringle, who’s filling in as the shop Santa at Macy’s department store, where her man-resistant mother works.
The trouble is that Mr Kringle thinks he really is Santa. So the authorities want him sectioned. The show features some pleasingly narcotic numbers, including Here’s Love (during which Kris controversially advises children where to find toys in rival department stores), and one humdinger: It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.
Bodinetz’s production channels the Technicolor innocence of the classic Hollywood movies. Tom Jackson Greaves’ choreography is restrained rather than raucous, and Olivia Du Monceau’s set evokes the great Christmas window displays of yore, with glittering gift boxes wrapped in shiny ribbon.
Caitlin Berry has a rich, fruity voice as the mum who has a pleasingly snappy way of dealing with suitors. Stuart Reid is the butt of most of that scorn as a tenacious neighbour and, as the girl, Maddison Thew made a thoroughly adorable sceptic when I saw it. But in Tim Parker they have a Santa to end all
Santas: warm, whiskery and as Christmassy as figgy pudding.
HAVING got into trouble with comments about politicians and battery acid, Jo Brand is putting that behind her with a stint in Richmond’s panto. She plays Queen Lucretia, who’s intent on doing away with Snow White with a poisoned apple.
BRAND’S best joke was a reference to her favourite dessert, Eton Mess ‘or Boris Johnson, as I like to call it’.
At times, her manner is so deadpan it looks like boredom. But my focus group (two nineyear-old girls) wasn’t bothered, and agreed that Muddles, played by Britain’s Got Talent finalist Jon Clegg, was their favourite.
A whizz impersonator, he gives us Simon Cowell, The Donald and Bojo. Plus he’s a dab hand at tongue twisters, including ‘Shirley Shaw’s sister Sharon sells sushi in the sushi store . . . ’ (seashells are so last century).
There are glitzier, lewder and more raucous pantos, I’m sure. But with its warmly local atmosphere, sparkling sets and a Gollum-like animation in the Queen’s mirror, Richmond’s festive offering is good family fun.