A king presides over Laguna Beach. The crown prince of Irvine is betrothed to the king’s daughter, Princess Aurora. An evil fairy lurks in Costa Mesa and a bumbling wanna-be knight winds up in Santa Ana.
There’s more than just a few friendly digs at this and neighboring townships in “Sleeping Beauty and the Winter Knight,” the second holiday panto underway this month at Laguna Playhouse created by the Lythgoe Family.
For the uninitiated, pantos are a British form of holiday entertainment based on European children’s stories. They are designed to introduce young children to live theater, with clever satire and humor to keep their adult chaperones awake.
Audience participation is key. Last Saturday, the Laguna Playhouse shook with laughing adults and kids, boos and hisses, applause and rousing sing-alongs.
The story revolves around Princess Aurora, a light-hearted and nimble-footed teenager played with the requisite charm and blond fairytale beauty by Cozi Zuehlsdorff.
Aurora is about to celebrate her 18th birthday and, at the same time, marry the Prince of Irvine, (Conor Guzman) in order to bolster the flagging economy of the kingdom of Laguna. Barry Pearl makes an endearing, if somewhat befuddled king, borrowing a few moves from Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Having never met the prince, Aurora is understandably reluctant, but the plot moves in the right direction when they meet accidentally and the princess swoons over his good looks. His charisma and vocal abilities in songs such as “All of Me” and other numbers are another matter, but that’s an adult peasant’s reaction. The kids rocked out to “Party Rock Anthem” and Aurora’s “Best Day of My Life.” The couple is charming as a duet in “So Happy Together,” the ditty immortalized by the Turtles. For all the rest, “Footloose” always gets feet tapping.
Originally written by the Brothers Grimm, the 19th century story could be, at least in a stage production, something of a snore. Yet, Kris Lythgoe does a fine job of keeping the audience’s attention with hilarious characters such as Silly Billy, a bumbling court jester played to the hilt by Benjamin Schrader, and Nanny Tickle, a tongue-in-cheek drag queen with a sharp tongue and off-beat fashion sense, engagingly camped up by Jeff Sumner.
Silly Billy might be a bumbler whose appearance is not enhanced by Buddy Holly glasses and poor fashion choices, but he longs to be a knight. Toward the production’s end, when chosen children were invited on stage, he earned his knighthood in real time while bantering with his charges. With his improvised repartee, he elicited an admission by one child to cheating at Pokemon and from another a sibling’s expression of love for her older brother, who turned embarrassed as only a pre-teen can.
Then there is the evil fairy Caraboose, also known as Maleficent. The Grimms made her out to be a jealous and vindictive hag, who curses a young princess to sleep for 100 years because she, the 13th fairy at a christening party for a dozen, felt slighted at being left out.
Here, Caraboose may cast a curse on an innocent, but she has a grand time doing it and an even better one trying to make it stick. Joelly Fisher’s renditions of “One Way or Another” and “Edge of Glory,” is a show stealer, establishing that, yes, evil can be rather sexy. (While at it, kudos to the artistry of costume designer Florencia Carrizo.) One is almost sorry at the end when a re-educated Caraboose…. oh never mind, we won’t give it away here.
Clearly Fisher is a musical stage veteran with Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” in her portfolio, and her stated intention of stirring up the audience hits the mark.
Come to find out that Caraboose has a little sister, the “Good Fairy,” Vonzell Solomon. She tries to lift the curse but needs help from her friends, Billy and Tickle. No matter, Solomon mesmerizes with her delivery of “Oh Holy Night.” She is a contemporary soul singer who earned a spot on “American Idol,” which was produced for a time by Kris Lythgoe’s father, Nigel.
One would be remiss to not praise the entire crew of dancers, including the two pink monkey’s doing the can-can and the teams (Blue and Pink alternating during every other performance) of young, roughly middle-school aged dancers. In spots, dance outshone the singing, but with the audience swept along, it all came to a happy blend.
Re-entering the canyon’s evening chill, an unaccompanied man long past childhood remarked, “Everybody comes out smiling.”
