Why perform Ben Crocker's Sleeping Beauty Pantomime Script...?
- ben60467
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 17 minutes ago
If you’re looking for a pantomime script which takes place over one hundred and eighteen years, plus interval – then this is the one for you!
Weirdly, despite the long timespan, Sleeping Beauty is probably my fastest playing panto script – and in the productions I’ve directed it often seems to come in at just over two hours including the interval.
One of the fun things about a one-hundred-year sleep is that, as a writer, you are free to come up with whatever inventions you wish to pass the time.
I therefore very much enjoyed creating a couple of set piece routines in the second half - from a nightmare for all the dreamers orchestrated by the wicked witch Carabosse, to a crazy musical dream scene around a dummy baby grand piano, which the dame pretends to play.
I put together the piano routine with Steve Bennett, the established and brilliant dame for the ten years I was Artistic Director at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter. Steve contributed much of the material, and it really is a routine which works likes a dream, which is fitting! That’s Steve at the piano in the photo.
Carabosse and her pet cat, Spindleshanks are probably my favourite Dastardly Duo.
Both with an over inflated view of their own brilliance, they can’t even waylay the Princess with a smuggled spinning wheel without a complete bust up along the way.
Their comic, uber competitiveness always works with an audience – and indeed with the critics. They are both great parts to play and you can cast a wide range of performers within the roles. I’ve seen both men and women play both parts and there seems to be something in the chemistry which always works.
Billy the Butler and King Nobby both enjoy some very funny
slapstick comedy and wordplay and the increasingly frenetic
recitations of the Princess’ twenty-five names from A to Z –
“Aurora, Belinda, Cassandra, Dorinda, Edina, Fenella, Georgina,
Harika, Imelda, Jacinta, Katrina, Lucinda, Marina, Nasima,
Owena, Paulina, Querida, Rowena, Selena, Tanita, Ulrica, Vivika,
Wanita, Xxena, Yanita, Zenita!” - is a real tour de force for the
actor playing the King.
All in all, Sleeping Beauty goes like a rocket from beginning to end. It’s great fun to play and goes down a storm with the audience. Check it out below!