The grand old Catford Broadway theatre was well known for its lively annual pantomime, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years as the venue has struggled with money.
Its future was looking very uncertain just a few years ago, but in 2022 Lewisham Council came up with a £7m upgrade programme to secure the beautiful 800-seater Art Deco theatre, which opened its doors in 1932.
And now its panto has been comprehensively resurrected thanks to the star transfer of writer-director Susie McKenna, who recently stepped down from the Hackney Empire after leading through what’s widely regarded as something of a golden age. ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is made by Joy Productions, a new, Lewisham-based company, that’s doing its best to make the show as accessible as possible to locals. Its future seems pretty secure for now, with next year’s show ‘Sleeping Beauty’ already announced.
Even with McKenna’s experience it would be a tall order to magic up a classic show in year one, but this is very promising.
In a year in which the London pantomime season has felt disappointingly timid, there’s something gloriously brazen about us being almost immediately introduced to the main antagonist, a posh, blonde cockroach called Boris the Cockroach. There is absolutely no subtlety about it, and while steaming into the guy who was in charge two prime ministers back hardly constitutes bleeding-edge satire, it is good fun.
The panto as a whole is considerably less polemical than some of McKenna’s Hackney shows, but she’s at least committed to throwing in the odd topical gag throughout (most of them bounced off the roomful of rowdy school children I saw it with on a matinee, but that’s part of the fun).
McKenna is good at finding fresh spins on well-worn panto plots – this take on the beanstalk story involves a lot of bees - and there are lovely sparkling flat sets and the cast are all extremely charming, from Durone Stokes’s peppy young Jack to Derek Elroy as his ditsy dame mother.
What it lacks is a proper star turn: at Hackney Empire McKenna could almost always draw on the nuclear-grade daming and world-class lungs of Clive Rowe, often call up West End and Broadway heavyweight Sharon D Clarke (who is present here in a short pre-recorded turn as the voice of the harp), and she sometimes even waded in herself. There’s nobody in that singing league here and while Elroy is a likeable dame, he’s a pretty restrained one (even his outfits are kind of modest). Even with an experienced writer-director at the helm, pantomimes are inherently pretty thrown together - you need a superstar performer to paper over the cracks with charisma, lung power and audience interaction.
Not quite there yet but still a breath of fresh air - Catford Broadway’s back, and so is Susie McKenna.