Last year Dave Anderson and David MacLennan penned Oran Mor's first summer panto, Goldilocks And The Glasgow Fair.
Now they do it all again, this time with a loose satirical take on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Surreal, nonsensical, liberal leftie fun it is too, with Libor, upward mobility, Alex Salmond, Facebook, the eurozone crisis and the Bullingdon Club just some of the targets held up for inspection in society's looking glass – all of it shot through with comic concert-party musical numbers.
Reuniting Oran Mor's Christmas panto cast of Juliet Cadzow, George Drennan, Anderson and Catriona Grozier, the show sees a skint Alice falling down a pothole in Byres Road all the way to Poundland, then through the looking glass, where she finds herself in a bizarre parallel universe populated by all manner of weird characters.
These include a stoned jazz trumpet-playing caterpillar still living in the 1960s (a hilarious turn from Drennan); Cadzow's haughty Queen of Diamonds; various witnesses for the "persecution" at Alice's trial for having ideas above her station; toffs Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber; and a middle-class, middle-aged couple representing the "squeezed middle".
Plotwise it makes even less sense than Carroll's original tale about growing up and identity. But the gags (both new and old) race along at a clip, and the show isn't afraid to send up its panto mores, Grozier's gallus Alice chastising the audience at one point that "Shakespeare was last month". Directed by Jimmy Chisholm, the cast seem to be having a ball, with plenty of corpsing, ad-libbing and a musical malfunction only adding to the ad hoc merriment.
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