Panto review – Beauty and the Beast: Frenzy and dry ice are no substitutes for imagination

Cork Opera House

**

Apart from the regrettable absence of a band (assistant musical director Ronan Holohan does his best on the keyboards), this production offers some startling innovations. Beauty, for example, is set at one point on a pile of firewood like Joan of Arc with lipstick, while the Beast, with better ringlets than the show's enchantress, is no more intimidating than Johnny Depp on a bad day.

The script by Trevor Ryan and Frank Mackey is guided by the Disney version of the tale of loyalty and love but even that translation has a coherent narrative which, in this adaptation, is so absent that a young neighbour in the audience wonders if the story is about wolves. Who could blame her?

Of course it's all fun, and no one in the cast is at fault in terms of engagement and energy. But with the exception of scene-stealer Barnaby Hughes as Gas-On (or Gaston for those who don't get it), neither can anyone compete against the riot of shouts, explosions and declamatory backing tracks.The only place where things make sense is in the delightful scene Be Our Guest where even the cutlery dances rather well. The dance teams themselves are both drilled and frilled, especially in a South American sequence in which, for some geographically inexplicable reason, a belly-dancer exposes a belly suggesting an advanced state of pregnancy. This jumble of allusions, innuendo and Christmas cracker jokes, with some numbers emanating from a galaxy far far away, is a reminder that those altering the source narrative should at least try to improve on it, and that frenzy and dry ice are no substitutes for imagination.

Ends Jan 16