This company had made an unsuccessful pitch to the PANDA pitching day, and I offered to view it to give feedback.
It's based on a traditional story of a "village idiot" type.
I found it amateurish, with poor production values and poor performance skills. There's a lot of second-rate children's theatre out there, and I'm afraid this is part of it. Lines were fluffed, choreography was rudimentary and inexpertly done, set was crude, cheap and looked it. There was an annoyingly memorable ditty that was repeated till you couldn't get it out of your head -that's one of the plus points. The other was quite a nice sound effect of Mr Vinegar's slow thought-processes.
There was no attempt to interact with the children in the audience before the show began. Towrads the end there was abit of moderately successful slapstick that got a reaction from the children just as i though they were sinking into complete apathy.
It appeared to be one of those husband-and-wife shows with no outside direction, and no realsense of where the best children's theatre is nowadays (see my Shona Reppe review)
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