Act Reviews 2024 / 2025 Season

look to audience or targeted at a watcher, leaving the inference to the public. The plot centred around a school group of older, Britney uniformed students visiting a local museum but one gets captured in the evil Blow Queen’s mirror and taken to her world. All characters then go along to free her. Virtually all pantomimes are driven by the dame character. Tony ScottGeorge provided a master class in how to interact with an audience with his energy and enthusiasm as the scrubber, Fonda Dix. He has the ability to create an atmosphere where the adult audience feel it is safe to interact and that things will not go too far. As adults we often lose the ability to be as uninhibited as we were as children but pantomime thrives on the shout outs and interactions and so it takes careful, skilful handling of the public to facilitate this and Tony is very skilful. In every way he resembled a typical dame, flirting with an audience member, the dress changes for each scene, the OTT makeup on a freshly shaved face. Personally, I do not mind a dame sporting a beard – we know it is a man in a frock and not someone trying to be Danny La Rue or on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, but each to their own fetish. The evil character has to make an impact and boy did Daniel Cope manage this, and then some. The opening bars to his rendition of ‘Relax’ were fabulous and sounded like a pro performing the song. The look that he and make-up artist, Mia Grant, had created was excellent. The use of white,

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