ajhlovestheatre

SLEEPING BEAUTY

written by Miss Mopp

directed by Chris Clegg

a Tuckshop production

Harold Pinter Theatre, London – until 31 December 2023

https://www.haroldpintertheatre.co.uk/shows/sleeping-beauty

Sometimes in the post Christmas slump, when you’re tired, stuffed (with food) and maybe a little hung over, all you really want in the way of entertainment is something elegant, classy and reflective, a show that gently washes over you. All well and good, but if that’s your idea of a fun time, then best to avoid the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre where this adult panto, featuring the cream of alumnae from the UK edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race, requires you to scream your lungs out, get indiscriminately sprayed with lube (yes I’m afraid so), and participate in a Mexican wave, be upstanding for a mass sing-off of Kylie’s ‘Padam Padam’ smash hit and generally check your inhibitions in with your coat. This show is a lot…and it’s also pretty impossible to resist.

Miss Mopp’s script for Sleeping Beauty is a pretty basic recounting of the well worn story, serving mainly as a framework on which to hang the outsize personalities, ad libs and performance skills of a selection of Drag Queens and Kings, each of whom rises so fabulously to the occasion that the show becomes an almost total pleasure. Chris Clegg’s rambunctious production lovingly incorporates many of the familiar panto traditions – the “he’s behind you” ghost routine, audience singalong, running gags, the frantic ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ song challenge – just served up with added bitchiness, and even more high camp than this already flamboyant genre usually sails in on.

It’s also genuinely witty, and, although definitely conceived as a garish playground for adults, it’s considerably less crude than the other current version of the same story, Sleeping Beauty Takes A Prick over at Charing Cross. Presumably as the run is so short, it rather looks like every expense has been spared on a set, but the sheer brio of the performances and the joyful inclusion of some well chosen pop songs with suitably tarted-up lyrics means that the delighted audience seldom notices. The overall effect of the production, which comes at you like a spangled steamroller, is of a West End theatre being transformed into somewhere like the RVT on a particularly good night. The comedy comes thick and fast, and if it doesn’t all fully land that may be down to the sometimes muffled sound quality, but there are some seriously fine mirth makers at work here.

There are ongoing jokes about lost watches, and winning WhatsOnStage awards, also a wonderful running sight gag involving a rainbow coloured confetti cannon that fires every time Michael Marouli’s lovably tetchy Good Fairy enters, yet somehow always manages to take her by surprise. Kitty Scott Claus is a queen of dead-pan delivery and her titular Princess Beauty gets funnier and funnier the more she tries to disengage from the chaos surrounding her, even getting upset because she’s more involved in the show than she thought she’d be (“I thought I’d be sleeping through most of this”). Kate Butch brings classy comedy chops to her mother, Queen Camilla, armed with some off-colour jokes about her marital predecessor (her name begins with a D and she’s had a terrible musical written about her) and a glorious hauteur that runs in delicious counterpoint to the indignities she’s forced to endure. LoUis CYfer is authentically hilarious as a bumbling but enthusiastic King Clyde and Kemah Bob’s non-binary, American Prince, or rather Prinyx, is a triumph of gormless bewilderment.

If you had to create a personification of camp, you’d probably come up with something very like Victoria Scone. Their green-haired, black leather clad, permanently bad-tempered Carabosse is a brilliant comic creation, deeply lovable despite being so thoroughly nasty, and one who could probably have their own entire show. Their singing is terrific, resulting in them snarling “did you forget you were supposed to be booing?” when the audience goes nuts at the end of a particularly impressive belty number. I also adored Ophelia Love as the inauspiciously named Villager No.4, a tragically overlooked diva-in-waiting hilariously desperate to wrestle the spotlight from her better known co-stars. When she gets her moment, it’s in a skilfully bastardised version of the ‘Roxie’ number from Chicago, and she’s so good at selling the material and negotiating the Fosse-esque choreography, that she is a considerable improvement on some of the dodgy “celebrity” casting that got to play Roxie Hart during the Kander and Ebb musical’s original London run.

The show has a distinct feeling of having been thrown together, but by people who know what they’re doing and understand exactly how much glitter will stick. The air of what’s-going-to-happen-next hysteria only really fizzles out in the final moments, where a barely rehearsed curtain call left everybody looking a little uncertain on both sides of the footlights. That’s a small glitch though in what is otherwise a couple of hours of really smashing entertainment.

“Isn’t this shit?!” gleefully leers Yshee Black’s adorable, eccentrically debauched Muddles (formerly Buttons) to the roaring crowd near the end. The only possible answer to that is “oh no it isn’t!”