The Snowman
'The Snowman' is back for Christmas 2024. This review is from 2022.
Birmingham Rep’s ballet spin-off of Raymond Briggs’ dreamy Christmas classic is back in London for its twenty-fifth year. Unlike the ageless book and TV animation that inspired it, it’s creaking a little – but it is a classic in its own right, and still inspires rapture in the two-to-eight-year-old target audience and nostalgic sniffles in their middle-aged parents.
It’s billed as ballet, but don’t expect tutus and immaculate technique. Small boys in slippers and snowmen encumbered by large white fatsuits are not the most naturally precise movers. Instead, the cast’s job is to convey the story’s cycle of Christmassy feelings via movement: joy, delight, humour, soaring imagination, merriment, and sad farewell are all writ broad and large in Robert North’s choreography.
Briggs’ story is padded out to fill one hour and 50 minutes on stage. The first half feels a bit long, despite some very ripe comedy from limbo-ing pineapples and bananas, and dance thrills from a leaping fox, squirrel and badger, trying to avoid becoming roadkill as the snowman chugs his noisy motorbike around the moonlit woods.
Ruari Murchison’s stage design still looks magical – dreamlike oversized interiors in the boy’s home, graceful trees bending over the exterior scenes, all bathed in rippling light by Tim Mitchell like it’s happening inside a kaleidoscope, an evocative nod to the wistful, flickering hand-drawn animation of the TV...