Dick Whittington and His Cat

We took our best friends’ seven-year-old to the panto on Saturday. Dick Whittington (and his cat) is the Lyric’s Christmas show. It’s written by Joel Horwood and Steve Marmion who were partly responsible for the same theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk last year.

This was pretty good. The story is traditional, in the sense that it’s traditional for the story to be twisted and bloated out of shape. In this the characters head off by boat to Timbucthree, a mysterious exotic island where the King turns out to love the cakes that Sarah the baker makes. As is now also traditional, the show features recent pop hits rewritten to fit the show. So the Glee version of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ became Dick’s dream of London. Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ very pleasingly became King Rat’s ‘Bad Rodents’. Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ became a hymn to London as did Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ (‘Ham-mer-smith, West 6, it’s unforgettable / Big red bus, we’re waving on top’). All of these transpositions were tremendous fun and sung with huge pleasure and verve by a terrific cast, especially the sweet-voiced, slightly camp and very funny Dick (Steven Webb), the utterly, thrillingly evil King Rat (Simon Kunz), and Alice, played by Rosalind James who had a truly amazing live voice.

The story is narrated by Bow and Belle, two bells who appeared on either side of the proscenium and were voiced by Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, in recordings. Some of this was fun, though to be honest pre-recording the voices meant they couldn’t meaningfully respond to the audience and some of the script came across a little flat. Most of the rest of the time, the story cantered along brilliantly. Having been spoiled by seeing Francis Tucker in the Liverpool Everyman Dick Whittington last year, I was slightly underwhelmed by Shaun Prendergast’s Dame, though in fairness our borrowed seven-year-old found her a hoot. Paul Medford was the cat and serviceably got the audience onside.

Made me think, once again, how I’d love to write a panto.