Disclosure: Unlike other shows – we had to buy tickets and even paid for
the programme. We even paid a booking fee! I know…it does happen sometimes.
LOL!
Snow White 2: Appley Ever After
Newcastle Stand Comedy Club
Until 30th December 2018
Family entertainment for £5 a head in that difficult time
between Christmas and New Year…we needed to check it out. Bearing in mind that the theatre around the
corner charges over 8 times that figure for it’s best seats, what was the show
going to be like?
2018 began with a review of Lee Kyle and Sammy Dobson on a
cold, wet night in Newcastle. There is some lovely symmetry in that we finish
the year with these very funny people in a packed Stand Comedy Club.
This is not Snow White though… this is the sequel. Prince Charming
has done one…ran off with a lover called Steve.
Snow White (Hannah Walker) has her riches and loves shopping but she
wants to meet Mr Right. Muddles (Lee Kyle) is still a friend, though he has
become obsessive bordering on stalking. Snow White’s best mate is Dame Frankie
(Sammy Dobson) whom she can confide
with.
Along comes a new suitor – the Handsome Prince Hal (Hal
Branson) whose only friend appears to be a vacuum cleaner. This is 2018 so they
are matched on a dating site.
But hang on – this is panto and panto needs a baddie… Well
the evil Queen was dispatched to be in a mirror for all eternity and so she
remains. Katherine Tanney is the plotting evil Queen in the mirror (on a large TV
next to the stage).
The TV comes in handy too when Snowy needs to make video
calls to the 7 dwarfs who are on a stag do in Blackpool – or deal with an evil
computer voiced by Britain’s Got Talent winner Lee Ridley.
Cheap pantos don’t have special effects, but they don’t
need them. Panto is about people interacting. We have a group of people most of
whom do stand up on a regular basis and hence know how to entertain and to tell
a joke. As an ensemble they work too. Whereas a lot of pantos involve a group
of people who had never met before the press photo call (like on The Chase),
this is a group of people who know each other well (like the contestants on the
Eggchasers). The cast credit themselves as producing a script and it works
well. The interactions between cast
members is natural (or as natural as 4 comics can be at 1 in the afternoon).
The show clearly got the audience going. One young person
was starting early in life with numerous heckles throughout the show,
especially when the evil Queen appeared on screen to insult the audience.
A number of standard panto elements are there, including
the take off scene which had the kids screaming ‘it’s behind you!’ Apart from a brief few seconds of Baby Shark,
all of the songs have had lyrics written by Lee Kyle. In this aspect the production
has overlap with the format of a musical as the lyrics support the exposition. Unlike
in most pantos when some recent songs are belted out to give the star on the
poster the solo spot demanded in their contract (or so I assume).
So onto the panto checklist: was it funny? Yes – we had
plenty of laughs. Did the kids enjoy it? – given the noise they were making,
indeed they did. Did the adults laugh at jokes the kids didn’t get? That happened
throughout the show, though the innuendo was thankfully fairly limited. Did
they attempt to tell a story? Yes they did. Did time fly by? Indeed it did –
though for those paying for parking it is worth noting it finished at 3:20 not
2:45. Recommended? Absolutely!
Review by Stephen Oliver
Tickets:
Snow White 2: Appley Ever After
Venue: The Stand Comedy Club, High Bridge, Newcastle NE1 1EW
Dates: 17th –
23rd / 27th – 30th December
Ages: 5+
Ages: 5+
Times and ticket links:
Cost: £5
Website: http://snowwhite2.co.uk/
Lee Kyle has a monthly children’s show at the Stand and is
on tour again in 2019 See: http://www.imleekyle.com/2019tour.
He kept mentioning it during the show so we thought we’d repeat it here.
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