The likely audience for this review, as for the Everyman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Panto itself, broadly falls into two categories: regulars who want reassurance that it’s festive business as usual, and first-timers who’d like to know what the show is about and if it is any good.
Let’s take the second category – what writer Chloe Moss’s version of Jack and the Beanstalk is about. I’m unconvinced, dear reader, that you’ll have much idea after seeing the show, let alone reading these words, but let’s have a stab. Vera, our lonely dame and proprietor of spiritualist healing shop Cosmic Crystals, has a son Jack who has stopped believing in magic. Jill, apprentice to Fairy Spacecake (Everyman stalwart Adam Keast, this time in 1960s flower power get-up), needs to earn her wings by returning something missing to Liverpool: Brookside? Klopp? Free evening parking? Nope. The correct answer is of course magic, but these people know their crowd.
Jack and the Beanstalk. Photo by Ellie Kurttz.
Evil ‘psychic’ businessman Alan Sucre (geddit?!) plans to trick Vera (Liam Tobin, a veteran of rival scouse pantos at the Royal Court as well as the National’s Boys from the Blackstuff) into handing over her business so that he can make his fortune swindling gullible crystal fans. Sucre is played with boo-inducing sneer by Zoe West, who won Villain of the Year at the UK Pantomime Awards for their turn in last year’s Everyman panto Rapunzel, and I can report that there is also a dancing cow and a Golden Goose that somehow resembles Liam Gallagher. After that you’re on your own. Best not to think too hard about it. Which is to say, for the first group of readers, rest assured that Jack and the Beanstalk is everything you’d hope and expect from the Everyman’s rock ‘n’ roll panto.
There is the usual array of tunes, gamely performed with instruments live on stage. Golden, from Netflix juggernaut KPop Demon Hunters, left some older audience members scratching their heads but will presumably raise the roof with the matinee crowd. Other than that, it was the standard mix. There are songs loosely linked to the show’s plot – I am hugely smug about predicting The Climb, a Miley Cyrus track covered by long-forgotten X-Factor progeny Joe McElderry, in our annual family game of ‘guess the panto playlist’. There are straight-up bangers (see: Let’s Go Crazy by Prince), and there are tunes that one suspects have been chosen purely because the cast can do them well (Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club). Indeed, normal service was resumed right down to the Super Soakers and the singling out of a hapless male audience member for solo vocals duty.
This annual exercise in dusting off well-worn set pieces is a reviewer’s nightmare – what more can be said about a production that is essentially the same each year other than being ostensibly, tangentially framed around a different fairy tale? But, as an audience member, it is delightful. Here we are again, Christmas has started and it’s time for a big-hearted, daft communal laugh. Is it any good? Yes, and I suspect it’s also exactly what we all need right now, regulars or not.
Main image by Ellie Kurttz
Jack and the Beanstalk is at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool until Jan 17, 2025. For more information, click here.
