After last year’s bland Cinderella, the Lyric Hammersmith has mercifully remembered that its place in the London pantomime panto is supposed to be ‘the cool one’.
That’s not to say it’s aggressively edgy (for starters its whole financial model is based on packing primary schoolers in). But this year’s Aladdin sees writer Sonia Jalaly and director Nicholai la Barrie – who did the honours for 2022’s excellent Jack and the Beanstalk – reintroduce light subversion, enjoyably ludicrous characters and a banging song list into proceedings. Meanwhile Emmanuel Akwafo is hitting peak form as dame in his third year on the job – a gifted, flamboyant and physically imposing actor, he’s always had the raw dame-ing ingredients but last year he was saddled with an awkward half-villain role that didn’t really work. This year he has kamikaze abandon in spades as he manifests the booming-voiced, lusty laundrette owner Widow Twerkey.
The plot is pretty much straightforward Aladdin. Our eponymous hero (Andre Antonio) is Twerkey’s son. He lives a humdrum life in Hammersmith until one day Princess Jasmine (Aleyna Mohanraj) comes along incognito to do her laundry. The two fall for each other, but inevitably this brings Aladdin into conflict with Jasmine's Shania Twain-loving evil stepfather Abanazaar. Andrew Pepper is an absolute hoot as the villain – tall, camp and weird, he looks like a walking Dr Seuss character and has a very amusing rivalry with Twerkey, who he beat in a 2009 line-dancing contest that neither of them have been able to move past.
There are some good jokes, varying from an extended bit about the magical lamp being trapped in a mystical dimension in the middle aisle of Lidl, to a light-but-pointed dose of republicanism. To a large extent it’s just high energy, goofy fun, that zooms by in a brisk two hours, mostly made pleasurable by whatever combination of Akwafo and Pepper happens to be on stage at the time.
But it’s also got an exceptionally well chosen set of songs that speak, as much as anything else, of creatives who pay attention to the dizzying eclecticism of the TikTok era. The primary school age audience I saw it with gave equal roars of approval to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme tune and ‘Maps’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the truly hallucinatory blend of Charli XCX’s ‘Von Dutch’ and Twain’s ‘Man, I Feel Like a Woman’ is as audacious as pantomime mash-up songs about being a villain get.
Good family fun, but most importantly, the Hammersmith panto has got its mojo back, just in time for Christmas.
