The Panto That Nearly Never Was at Theatr Clwyd online | Review
December 28, 2020 Last updated:
March 17, 2021
I’m not sure if there are any pantomime purists out there, but they may boo and hiss at the very thought of the baddie in The Panto That Nearly Never Was being cooperative from the outset. In this most extraordinary of years for theatre, Bella Trix (Alice McKenna) doesn’t even have an evil laugh, although she implies social distancing of sorts has been going on in pantomime for centuries: rarely do the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ beings with magical powers mix. But here, she and Maybelline (Chioma Uma) form a Christmas bubble, together with Dame Deni Dolittle (Dan Lloyd) and her son Dylan (Ben Locke, who skilfully gets some good punchlines in without stealing the limelight from his stage mum). The three-household group want to save pantomime, and I trust it is not too much of a spoiler to state that there’s a happy ending.