It’s not often that a latecomer to the stalls is heckled by a pantomime dame – and a magnificently ad-libbing one at that. “Don’t tell me you were getting ready. I’m in this,” Dame Daisy Trott shoots out to the offender, pointing to her elaborate dress, piled so high with fruit and vegetation that she looks like a campy Carmen Miranda.
From the moment John Elkington flounces on as Dame Daisy, the mother of Jack (Finton Flynn) and his simpleton brother (Bradley Judge), Elkington holds the audience in the palm of his hand and tickles us silly with his off-the-cuff jokes and glorious costumes (a hot-air balloon at one point, a glamorous green bean at another).
This is a terrific production, which follows the folktale about magic beans and giant beanstalks, but in-between gives us music-hall skits that are endearing and incredibly funny. “Heaven’s alone, what the Dickens, let’s bring on the singing chickens,” say the cast, to cue a dancing chickens’ number, inserted for nothing other than the sheer joy of it.
There are many of these lovely, rib-tickling moments with the Dame, the villainous Fleshcreep (Tom Hopcroft), who travels with a squadron of child-dancers, and the Trott family’s lovable cow Pat (Alice Redmond), whose name yields plenty of puns and who brings her own tranche of great jokes.
The Dame is the widowed inheritor of a failing farm and the giant (Ian McKellen features as his voice) seems like a thuddish landlord in the sky, who sends out his agent Fleshcreep to do his bidding. This family is so poor that the ducks throw bread at them when they go to the park, they joke, but beneath the laughs there is topical sting around the tyrannically wealthy and the exploited impoverished.
When the giant finally appears, he is an arrestingly big and detailed puppet with a single eye and a club in his hand, like one of Roald Dahl’s oversized monsters.
There is so much for children here, but it is simultaneously a show for adults, too, brilliantly blue in its double entendres and referencing everything from brat summer to Oasis and Strictly Come Dancing.
The production find a winning triumvirate in writer-director Adam Penford, whose script is stuffed with jokey imagination, the designer Cleo Pettitt, whose outre costumes are glamorous and folksy, and choreographer Rosanna Bates, whose gorgeous movement is reminiscent of silver-screen musicals.
The original songs work and the high-energy pop covers are infectious, beautifully sung, and fit with the drama of the moment.
Amid the riotousness, there is heart. The romance between Jack and Jill (Jewelle Hutchinson, who has an especially powerful voice) is surprisingly tender and there are lyrical moments when the fairy godmother (Caroline Parker) signs songs rather than singing them.
The production reaches its fizzing peak in the first half, after which it slows down but never loses its charisma. Every character is endearing, each performance magnetic. It is quite a feat to make pantomime seem this improvised but also polished. Utterly uplifting festive fare.
• At Nottingham Playhouse, until 18 January.
