I say, only bean! This sauced-up panto is a right treat: VERONICA LEE reviews Jack And The Beanstalk

By Liam On Dec 16, 2022

Jack and the magic beans (London PD)

Rating: *****

Verdict: A triumph of obscenity and glamor

Since producer/director Michael Harrison brought pantomime to the Palladium in 2016 after a decades-long absence, it has quickly become a star-studded annual event, largely due to the megawatt presence of Paul O’Grady and Julian Clary.

Unfortunately, O’Grady no longer wears Lily Savage dresses. But Clary has created something of a repertory company with Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers and Gary Wilmot, who each year seem to have as much fun as the audience.

And so proves Jack And The Beanstalk, a triumph of bawdy and glamour, and that’s just Clary, decked out in fabulous costumes including various suggestive legumes and vegetables as The Spirit Of The Beans, delivering double entendres from Harrison’s brilliant screenplay. . When she appears as a bean, she states that she “will shoot herself against the wall”.

The script is more family-friendly than in years past, but adults won’t be disappointed by the abundance of good-natured filth.

The story, such as it is, is that The Spirit comes to the aid of Jack’s mother, Dame Trot (Dawn French), who has to sell her cow, Pat (Rob Madge), to pay off the giant’s henchwoman, Mrs. Blunderbore (Alexandra Burke) then helps rescue King Nigel (Nigel Havers) from the giant’s castle.

The political jokes are good: Clary enters first as an Australian jungle bean, Matteupus Hancockius, who “can be fatal to retirees,” and “Boris” is mentioned; having impregnated Dame Trot in the intermission, he had to leave early as she had a party to go to.

Old favorite jokes also appear: Clary offers her magical helicopter to cut the beanstalk and send the Giant to his grisly fate.

In a show that echoes the variety this theater was once famous for, Harrison puts on a great offering, including panto scenes and some song-and-dance numbers involving the big ensemble.

And while the show is fueled by the energy of Clary and her “raunchy tsunami,” the other leads are having their moment, too. French and Burke have a dance to Strictly, Gary Wilmot (Queen Nigella) does his party piece of ‘list’ songs, this year ‘I haven’t been well’, about medical conditions, while ventriloquist Zerdin (with puppet Sam ) as Silly Simon shines in his tongue twister scene.

The show oozes quality, and should cost upwards of £150 for the most expensive seats, in design by Mark Walters, lighting by Ben Cracknell and costumes by Hugh Durrant, and is run to licks under Harrison’s spirited direction.

Havers takes another beating from the wonderfully cranky Clary (mostly for an alleged bladder problem), but so does everyone else. Even Louis Gaunt and Natalie McQueen as the young lovers Jack and Jill are mercilessly criticized for being musical theater performers.

The massive beanstalk rising from the stalls provides a wow moment at the end of the first act, while kids will be wowed by the giant animatronic and ogres (from The Twins FX).

The script is more family-friendly than in years past, but adults won’t be disappointed by the abundance of good-natured filth.

Until January 15 (lwteatros.es)

Yes, Ja! It’s a very dolly Christmas for Scrooge

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Carol (Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre)

Qualification: ***

Verdict: Tennessee puts a twist on a classic

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol is everything you’d expect: a bright and fresh D-cup Charles Dickens Country & Western mix.

Or, if you prefer, Dolly’s new musical smacks Robert Bathurst’s Scrooge on the butt with a banjo and sets the yee-ha on hogwash.

Adjustments must be made to the story to suit the transatlantic setting: Depression-era Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee in 1936. Scrooge then becomes a rapacious small-town industrialist, chosen by the corrupt Marley as a business partner. because ‘it makes the numbers tell stories’.

And the Ghosts of Christmas Present, Past, and Yet to Come are portrayed as a seamstress, a coal miner, and an evil fiddler dressed in black.

But the show’s biggest assets are Dolly’s music and lyrics (sadly, not the star herself), played on folk instruments like banjo, fiddle, washboard and triple bass.

The melancholy strings of Appalachian Snowfall, young Scrooge’s wistful nostalgia and Three Wishes for his dead sister, the jolly Smoky Mountain Christmas, plus the maudlin Circle Of Love, tug at our heartstrings as much as our toes. And the climax is a full-on hoedown, raucously performed on the tight-fisted old coffin.

Best known for his wry, sad comedy, Bathurst is a positively presidential Ebenezer with a thick mustache perched on his upper lip like a gray old possum.

Moving across the stage with Nixonian seriousness, he stoically watches his life story.

Eventually, it breaks out into a song proper to the townspeople, moaning meekly: ‘I’ve been changed, rearranged. . . saved’ (sounding sweetly like Kermit the frog in that other adaptation of A Christmas Carol).

A bit pompous at first, Alison Pollard’s production, set mostly in the town grocery store, grows on you like a bottle of moonshine. High tech it is not.

Squeezed onto the shallow stage of this concert hall like an excitable church choir in town hall, it specializes in a God-loving atmosphere rather than special effects. And in that department it is in line with Dickens’s Christmas message of good cheer.

PATRICK MARMION