Slightly adapted since the previous productions (see reviews for Circa’s 2005 and Fortune’s 2006 productions), Roger Hall’s Cinderella – the pantomime is back by popular demand. It seems the only significant changes are the update of political and pop culture references and the ugly sisters’ names.

I’ve never really got pantomime myself – even as a child I thought it was a bit naff (although the cross-dressing always struck a chord). But if panto’s your thing, this version of Cinderella ticks all the boxes; it’s bawdy musical comedy with an abundance of slapstick for the children, dodgy sexual innuendo for the adults (which goes right over the heads of the youngsters) and tabloid-esque topical in-jokes; there are gender role reversals; audience participation: the audience are encouraged to sing along, shout warnings and insults, cheer the show-off characters and "awww" in sympathy; over-the-top acting; animal costumes; and a deliberately amateurish style traditional in pantomime: props chucked over the set onto the stage when the actors need them, ‘accidental’ glimpses of the hand behind the puppet, fumbled cues, etc.

The ugly sisters are played by men in dreadful dresses. Ralph Evens as Kylie and Ian Fenwick as a burly but camp Britney are a hit. Cinderella (Verity Burgess) and Prince Charming (Paul Lewis) are the two-dimensional goodie-two-shoes characters that one would expect.

Cinderella is hardly downtrodden, though. Her greatest hardship seems to be that her stepsisters are frumpy, and she’s too busy fantasising about Paris to find time to scrub the floors. In fact she’s a bit of a whiney brat, but you want her to get together with the prince simply because that’s how the story goes. I sided with the sisters’ wickedly funny mocking of her more often than I sympathised with mopey Cinderella. The sisters aren’t very evil, more a pair of jealously bitchy trannies. As my son asked in the second half: ‘Where’s Cinderella’s stepmother?’ if there is any mention of why she isn’t in the picture, I didn’t catch it, and without her there’s no real villain, and therefore no real triumph in the end.

The Fairy Godmother (Elaine Vaughan) natters away with the audience, explaining pantomime etiquette in numerous asides and is a constant source of entertainment. Vaughan also plays a Queen Helen (as in Mirren), the prince’s mother.

Darren Ludlum plays both Cinderella’s father and the prince’s father. He ‘forgets’ which character he’s supposed to be playing, and has to be scolded by the Queen. We are also instructed absolutely under no circumstances to yell out when the Vaughan comes on as the Queen: "It’s the Fairy Godmother!"

Mark Harrison and Darren Waugh are Fimble and Fumble, the goofy stagehands and the footmen that take Cinders to the ball. 

I suspect the more archetypal characters appeal strongly to young children (i.e. Prince Charming and Cinderella), though my personal favourites are drag queens Kylie and Britney, and Dan Dini, the chauvinistic, thigh-slapping servant (played by the shapely Stacey Musham-Bolt in tight breeches) who swaps identities with the Prince so as to pick up chicks (and give the prince a break from his royal duties).

The Prince is ordered by his mother to hurry up and choose a bride, after all he’s been gallivanting around the ‘werld’ on his OE and it’s ‘tayme to settle dahn’. But the prince doesn’t want to marry someone who only loves him for his royal privileges. Cinderella, on the other hand, doesn’t care much for princes or royal pomp and ceremony…

Cinderella meets the Prince at the Cock & Bull where he’s posing as a waiter and she’s mooning over a Paris travel guide. Later the queen rips up his bit of paper with Cinderella’s cell phone number on it and the ugly step sisters rip up Cinders’ invitation to the ball.

Fate conspires against the lovers further, when the Fairy Godmother finally shows up to work her magic, only to discover she hadn’t checked the expiry date on her wand, and it runs out of magic at midnight! Bugger. That’ll teach her for shopping at the $2 shop.

You know the rest.

The music and songs are fun: silly, catchy, clever nonsense, directed by Terence Penk, who plays keyboard onstage and gets hit on by an ugly sister. A number of the actors have extensive singing experience and it shows. However, Cinderella’s little hiphop-hooray, after she tries on the shoe and finds out she gets to marry the Prince, is a bit odd.

Director Adey Ramsel’s notes on pantomime go: "the words are for the adults, the pictures are for the kids". Yes, except when the focus is more on the words than the visuals and loses the younger ones’ interest. Although, opening night only had about half a dozen children in the audience, so it was hard to gauge what worked for them.

It’s also pretty long for a kid’s show – and the two that I brought with me (aged 3 and 6) were too tired by the end to keep up with what was going on. Because of its length (2 ½ hours, plus an interval), with younger ones I’d recommend the matinee. 

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