Wicked Witches - A Popular Panto at Pleasance (London) Review
Written by Penny for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review
This year’s festive offering from The Pleasance (in association with The Vaults) is a Panto mash-up of Wicked and The Wizard of Oz. There’s a family friendly version available as well as tonight’s drag-cabaret, which is strictly adults only!
Set twenty years after that first fateful trip over the rainbow, Dor is dragged back to Oz-lington by a snowstorm where they get the OG squad back together to try and save the day. With on-screen cameo appearances from Sir Ian McKellan as Toto and Jeremy Corbyn as the Wizard of Oz-lington, Wicked Witches promises to bring us the characters we know and love as we’ve never seen them before.
The audience is certainly in the mood to festivate, with some swankified costumes and face paint on display, blowing bubbles from the wands left on our seats. The stage is set with the famous yellow brick road and an emerald slash curtain hiding the secrets of Oz-lington. Designed by Isabella Van Braeckel, who is also responsible for the costumes, it’s simple and the bold colours add to the sense that we are in an Ozian fever dream.
The show has a strong start, with Wicked Witch, Adelphaba Dazeem (but you can call her Adele) taking to the stage and serving fantastic villain energy. Drag performer Gigi Zahir revels in the audience boos and has a commanding presence. As the show progresses, her role fades into the background a little (which is a shame as she’s great), overshadowed by her nemesis, the Good Witch “Kelly” (because she’s Oz-born, Osbourne, get it?). Eleanor Burke does the best she can to deliver Panto magic with a script that unfortunately doesn’t live up to the sparkle of the cast.
Written by Shane Shayshay Konno, who also directs, it's all a bit predictable, from the jokes to the set pieces. It’s smutty without being filthy and sequences with “Adele’s Balls” and a “ghost” following our little gang of heroes feel a little rushed and lacking in impact. Some wordplay around which/witch is more polished and well delivered with good pace. And while an early scene involving a magic Labubu-Bush feels a bit laboured, the nod to those terrifying cult dolls is very current and goes down well.
All the call and response madness you expect from Panto is there, although the audience interaction is mostly saved for those lucky enough to be sitting at the front cabaret tables. It would add to the general audience experience if more was directed at those sitting further back or in the Circles – it’s a small enough venue that it would be easy to include everybody in the fun.
The ”celebrity” cameos are literally phoned in – pre-recorded and projected on a screen as if it’s a Facetime call. They don’t add a huge amount but go down well – also giving the cast the opportunity to lightly mock the audience, “you didn’t actually expect Jeremy Corbyn to BE HERE did you?”.
As the simple Scarecrow, Nick MacDuff doesn’t have a huge amount to work with but still manages to bring some gormless charm to his limited stage time.
The characters of Tin 2.0 (Lew Ray) and Dor (Ro Suppa) are better served by the writing. Tin has had a glow up and is now a woman with improved tech capacity, full of sass and displaying plenty of charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.
Dor is non-binary, pointing out that if you identify as NB, you have to have a single-syllable name – calling out to any fellow non-binos in the audience to prove their point. The point is proved! Suppa gives one of the stand-out performances, dealing well with good-natured audience heckling and delivering a recurring joke in their strong London accent about how they are DEFINITELY from Kansas.
Some issues with the sound balance meant that a lot of the singing was overpowered by the backing tracks and the show lacked a stand-out number, instead opting for shorter bursts of singing with repetitive lyrics. Although music from Wicked and The Wizard of Oz can’t be used for obvious (litigious!) reasons, the scenes are often underscored with bursts of music that bring those classic shows to mind, and the script is peppered with references that link to them that will raise a smile if not a belly laugh.
Wicked Witches possibly suffers from having two versions in performance – it’s not as risqué as a lot of “adult” pantos and a lot of the family-friendly elements feel a little too simplistic for this more mature audience. But, if you’re looking for a couple of hours of silliness and escapism, you could do a lot worse than grabbing your besties and going on a Yellow Brick Roadtrip to Oz-lington this Christmas.
Wicked Witches runs at The Pleasance until 22nd December, with its family friendly version running until 28th December. Find out about both shows and book here.
★ ★ ★