The Wykehamist
for Night Two, nailing all her cues— including a musical sequence— whilst also being incredibly dramatic and funny. On closing night, she even decided to further test her prowess, ditching the script and opting instead for improvisation. Her quick wit and snappy humour thankfully averted disaster, and resulted in her character proving to be one of the most popular with the audience.
Another very pleasant surprise of the performance turned out to be the generally decent quality of the songs, most of them covers of your favourite pop tunes: ranging from a disco jam of ABBA’ s Money, Money, Money to Matteo’ s solo rendition of Billie Eilish’ Bad Guy. With the help of the back-up vocals of Benjamin Shahsavanpour( Coll:, 2024-), all of the songs were met with at least some amount of applause— no small feat in a school production. The ghosts’ number was especially popular with the younger years in the audience, for reasons that I have so far been unable to ascertain— you may have to go ask the first years yourself.
Other notable performances included Demyan Gibbon’ s( E, 2022-) croaky crone, sacrificing his voice box for the stage, part of the belly-dancing gender-bent trio of witches with Xander Sharrocks( Coll:, 2022-) and Noah Funnell( I:, 2024-). Anthony Kim’ s( E, 2021-) Number One also played brilliantly off KF’ s Evil Queen, along with Jonty Spry’ s( K, 2024-) mischievous Mirror, cheekily tiptoeing off stage in the back as if no one would notice. Nicholas Barclay( K, 2022-), meanwhile, managed to seamlessly transform from German-speaking humanoid frog to posh prince, his practised poise complemented by the clever costuming. He served once again as the love interest of Cassian Hoare’ s( K, 2022-), the latter’ s latest portrayal of a damsel-in-distress arguably no less convincing than his other blonde Jungfrauen.
Much further credit must, of course, also go to the crew for their superb work( Thomas Dunn, H, 2021-; Alexander Hayward, K, 2022-; Cosmo Clifton, F, 2024-; and Bertie Carter, D, 2024-). The set, built by JC’ s experienced team, featured very many nice touches like the information that Widow Twankey’ s‘ 100 Pound Shop’ did not, in fact, take credit. The lighting and sound cues were both executed nearly flawlessly, the creative use of effects much complementing the music and dance sequences, over and over again turning our dear QEII into a thundering dancefloor.
Finally, bravissimo to KF and AML for directing such an ambitious venture into the pantomime genre. It was undoubtedly a roaring success, bringing along with it a number of unprecedented firsts, despite being based on what is arguably a tricky and character-bloated script. Many elements of the beloved genre were easily recognisable, and I believe I speak for everyone there( and especially the younger years) in saying that, for at least a brief second, we were all transported back to our younger selves.
After all, do we love pantomime? OH YES WE DO.
Winston Chan( Coll:, 2022-)
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