If you want the secret behind the UK’s fastest-selling panto, look no further than Danny Adams. For the past 14 years, the rubber-legged entertainer has worked tirelessly with his father, Clive Webb, to generate a phenomenal north-east success. As Danny the Clown in this year’s turbocharged offering, he hits the stage with a determination to give every last person a good time and manages to make a big room feel small.
His appeal is not so much in being witty or cute as in his tornado-like energy. Sure, he can handle a gag and his cheeky-chappy grin is infectious, but it’s his athletic level of commitment that wins you over. No routine is complete without him bounding into the auditorium or legging it across the stage, coyly pirouetting en route. Even when his schoolboy humour teeters towards the smutty, he has too much charm and hyperactive energy to lower our spirits.
It’s just as well he does because nobody will be gripped by a plot stretched so thinly you forget what’s at stake. In venerable panto tradition , Goldilocks and the Three Bears places the children’s story in the context of two rival circuses. Laura Evans’s Goldilocks is now the daughter of Chris Hayward’s glamorous impresario Dame Rita, while the three bears become hostages in an animal rights standoff involving Steve Arnott as the vivisectionist baddie Baron Von Vinklebottom. For no apparent reason, Danny the Clown has fallen for Goldilocks (in a male-dominated panto, the poor woman has more songs than lines) but is mainly interested in a vainglorious ambition to become ringmaster.
Michael Harrison’s production loses in personality what it gains in slickness, an efficient machine precisely calibrated, right down to the actors corpsing and the audience “volunteering”. The show is an even more curious hybrid than average, with the story being a pretext for a bill of jugglers, skaters and – wow! – motorcyclists, interspersed with generic family-viewing pop songs. Think Billy Smart’s Panto meets The X Factor. However crowd-pleasing the individual acts, it’s only Danny’s attempt at walking a tightrope that has anything to do with the story, creating an emotional deficit amid the big top pizzazz.
• Until 20 January.
