Dick Whittington, London Palladium 2017

There aren't that many pantos to pick from.

Cinderella - Done
Dick Whittington- Done
Aladdin - On in town already
Snow White
Jack & the Beanstalk
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty

That's about it for the Qdos stable? Don't think they do a Mother Goose or Babes in the Wood.

They should do 'Peter Pan'. Bring Back Lulu!

Above The Stag are doing “Snow White: Rotten to the Core”! 😛

Robin Hood is another Qdos one.

Thanks, is that the alleyway to the right of the stage door?

Two separate questions for this thread. Is Charlie Stemp staying until the last performance on the 14th or leaving early to travel to NYC?

Secondly Babes in the Wood has been a Palladium favourite over the years and in nowadays tied in with Robin Hood.

Snow White is a Palladium possibility for next year because Warwick Davis has a very high profile at the moment to lead the "dwarfs".

I suspect Warwick wouldn't agree to work for Qdos unless they started using real dwarfs in all their pantos again. They have people on their knees with fake legs instead. He runs the main dwarf casting agency (Willow Management) so them no longer employing dwarfs will not sit well with him.

Oh, I see... 

It’s been almost forty years since I last saw a Palladium panto; I remember my sister, then aged six, going up onto the stage to ‘sing’ with Danny La Rue. She was convinced she had sung with ‘a lady’. Over the intervening years I’ve not felt the urge to attend many others, but the promise of seeing Elaine Paige and Charlie Stemp this year, not to mention the draw of it being A Palladium Panto was too much to resist, and we took our seats yesterday afternoon in more or less the same row as we’d sat all those years ago. (Back then they’d been ‘comps’ towards the very end of the season, in April! This time they were a bit more expensive!)

Well from the minute it started I could feel myself grinning...

This is, as many others have mentioned, a superb production with a superb cast. Led by Julian in his outrageously over the top costumes, it was a joy to see EP belt out her signature tunes, even if the words had been tinkered with- no mean feat keeping Mr Clary on track in I Know Dick So Well (NB it was Dick that might have been ‘the other way’ not the actor playing him...) and another joy to see Charlie leap about and pirouette with that cheeky smile once more. (I do hope we don’t lose him to the US of A). How fantastic is Gary Wilmott with his chocolate bars and tube stations? And how fantastic is Nigel Havers, hamming it up with his props and his gyrations, desperately trying to keep up with Diversity who were there for... well, a bit of diversity, I suppose. I enjoyed Paul Zerdin’s antics, and he was particularly charming with a delightful little chap up there with him yesterday, and I wondered if that little chap would remember it all in forty years’ time...

I loved the giant rat, and the bus and the boat, although it was hard to believe that any ship would have suffered quite so perilously on the high seas with some of the fittest sailor-boys in charge (their sequins out-dazzling and their trousers out-tightening even Strictly!) In The Navy indeed! The Twelve days of Christmas brought the house down, quite literally, and the sets and costumes just got better and better… You could see how they’d spent your money.

And it occurred to me as we were leaving (out of an exit that led us Lord Lloyd Webber knows where…) that apart from the frivolity and camp, panto has a valuable lesson to teach us all. Oh yes it does! It teaches us that it is great to laugh, at the actors who wear silly costumes that look like clocks, and who carry daft props in the shapes of barrels that show their ‘bottoms’, and at some of the members of the audience for calling out “Hello Jack!” just like the actor told them to. But panto also teaches us that because the actors laugh at themselves (all right some of it is rehearsed…!) it’s okay for us to laugh at ourselves too.

What a way to start my theatre-going year!

The Grinning Man for me next weekend.

I hope I’m grinning just as much after that.

Oh tony, if only I'd known you were going to be there...

(I'd have baked a cake. Or worn my spangly waistcoat. Or even said 'hello'...! )

We got talking to a couple of gents behind us, or they got talking to us is probably more accurate. One introduced the other as 'Panto Queen': "He's been to seven already this season. That's right. Seven! This is his second time to see this one... Not a patch on Cinderella last year which you can catch in Birmingham if you're near there... (we're not) blah, blah, blah...." Very friendly and beating a hasty retreat at the end to catch their train back to Brighton.

Warren Russell went on for Ashley yesterday. I saw him in their first routine and he looked similar (from the back of the upper circle) and seemed confident at the front of the routine.