The Lyric’s Cinderella is its own mixture of saucy and sweet. It winks at adults but welcomes children. It has a traditional shape but is wired firmly into today. The Lyric has always been rooted in its borough, and, as the triumphant Bugsy Malone proved, always had a terrific youth company. Cinderella is a vindication of their strategies. Krystal Dockery, who makes an assured professional stage debut as Cinders, has previously performed in three shows as a Young Company member.
Cinderella’s prince-winning shoes are Converse trainers, silver and glittering. She meets Prince Charming on the bank of the Thames, amid mud and abandoned supermarket trolleys. They are there to catch something. “They are your crabs. And I’m giving them to you.”
There are plenty of shout-outs and sweet-throwing. Yet, under Ellen McDougall’s direction, this panterella also has real charm. Tom Wells’s script is tight. Oliver Townsend’s jingle-jangle, bingle-bangle design completely beguiles. A bright frieze of cut-out clocks, like luminous snowflakes in green and pink and gold, casts a seasonal spangle over the action. In a lovely transformation scene the lively mice, played by the Lyric’s Young Ensemble, find their tails and ears have been lit up.
Booty and Licious, the two Uglies, are played with relish by Matt Sutton and Peter Caulfield in green and orange wigs with PVC bums and bosoms. In keeping with the generous boisterousness of the production, they are avid rather than acid. Central to the twinklingness is Samuel Buttery’s Buttons, a diffident figure in dungarees (first denim, later gold). Endearing, androgynous, gentle, he has within minutes got the audience shouting “Panto funk it up”. Funk it up the Lyric do.
