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First Family Entertainment has made a name delivering the biggest, brashest and celebiest pantos in the UK. It’s the company that brought Pamela Anderson and Priscilla Presley to the Christmas stage, and when it gets it right, it can win you over with sheer starry firepower. Unfortunately it’s hardly brought its A-game to Richmond, offering a perfunctory ‘Snow White’ with too much of the magic missing in action.
Headline sleb Jerry Hall makes a decent Wicked Queen, drawling, cackling and grimacing through plentiful pops at her age and vanity. She may be lipsyncing her musical numbers, but she brings the goods, and knocks the spots off Aimie Atkinson’s forgettable Snow White. For all of his years haunting children’s television, Chris Jarvis lacks energy and charisma as the spoonerising Muddles, and Nicolas Colicos as Herman the Henchman can barely raise a laugh with a fart joke in a theatre full of schoolkids.
So thank Christmas for the Dwarfs, and particularly Jon Key as Grumbly, who may get all of the best lines, but proves to be such a consummate comic talent that he earns himself several spontaneous rounds of applause. He truly lights up the stage, which is particularly necessary when the script is so heavily bedecked with gloomy cobwebs of dated pop culture. Is SuBo still a thing? Really?
A bigger problem than the ingredients present, however, is that some things are absent altogether. There’s no dame, no slop scene, no sweets for the kids. The action wraps up 20 minutes before the curtain, leaving Jarvis to embarrass himself with a lengthy and inexplicable Wild West singalong and announce the winner of a competition to bag a Littlewoods hamper.
As a pre-show trailer announces, pantos are many children’s first experiences of the magic of theatre, and you’d be well advised to find them a less spartan introduction than this one.
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