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Whether it's Maleficent or Katie Hopkins, the villains we love to hate are so much more memorable than the whiter-than-white good guys that eventually defeat them. So the baddie-baiting premise of Nancy Harris and Marc Teitler's scrappy new musical has plenty in it to charm both children and adults who are tired of saintly Peppa Pig's farmyard homilies.
Captain Hook, The Big Bad Wolf, the Ugly Sisters and Rumpelstiltskin are finally being punished for their wicked ways by the Board of Fairytales. After a visually stunning capture scene at Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage, Wolf joins the fold. Dean Nolan is an edgy, riotously funny delight as Wolf: James Button's ingenious
design decks him out in wolf tattoos, a suitably lupine band t-shirt and even a furry tail dangling from his belt. But he can't quite bring himself to delivering the huff and puff his costume suggests, wrestling with the conflict between his villainous grandma-gobbling role in the story and his cutesy offstage romance with Cinderella. His
bickering baddie cellmates have no such qualms: they tell their stories in cabaret-style numbers, and torment poor Rumpelstiltskin, re-imagined as an irate Scottish punk who's got nothing scary about him but his farts.
Harris and Teitler spin their original Grimm fairy tales into comic gold for ages five-plus. But no amount of spit-and-polish can hide the fact that they're so interested in how and why stories use villainy, they forget to include any conflict. Cinderella and Peter Pan make unconvincing nemeses, however hilariously en pointe their perfume-spraying, cushion-scattering, clean-eating ways may be. And any child hoping that the hinted-at subterranean horror the Snuffalo will make his snorting appearance at the curtain call is doomed to be disappointed. Butalthough there's precious little peril, precious little perils will be kept royally entertained by this musical's anarchic charms.