Pantomime

The Snaw Queen

Tron, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

four stars

ALL across the Pantosphere, mirrors are copping a bad name for causing mischief, mayhem and malice – and indeed, it’s a mirror that drops Santa (aka Kristine Cagney Kringle) and her oddball team of little helpers into a heap of reindeer doo-doo when the Snaw Queen decides to put a freeze on Christmas FOREVER.

It’s no’ exactly Hans Christian Andersen, and it’s no’ Grimm either, though there are some very scary moments – it’s actually a bumper bundle of Johnny McKnight’s idiosyncratic panto-smagoria where, inside Kristine K’s fat-suit, his own pneumatic bum brings plenty of “ooh, missus...!” frolics into play.

At first, all is ticketty-boo in Santa’s workshop. But then Rudolf picks up the Goblin Queen’s evil mirror – and his inner, wicked self bursts out as the Snaw Queen. Lesser dames than Darren Brownlie might shiver at the prospect of designer Kenny Miller’s uber-clingy pink, sequin-scattered body-skin, but Brownlie’s lithe, long-limbed dancer’s body doesn’t display even a hint of goose-flesh as he struts eye-poppingly hot stuff in his confident high heels.

Can Kristina and her versatile, multiple-role-playing team ever undo the spell? Will shy Olive (the other reindeer) ever hope to pull Santa’s sleigh – and Rudolf, whom she fancies beyond wild oats? C’mon folks, this is a panto: the plot-line will – like the full-on song and dance routines – bend and twist in entertainingly untoward ways. It will breeze through showers of cunning puns, fearlessly close encounters with the audience and even go brilliantly Underground (on Glasgow’s Subway) until it reaches that achy-breaky heart-stopping moment when Julie Wilson Nimmo’s Olive slow-sings the Mariah Carey number that is now McKnight’s panto call-sign. Aaawww – what more could you want for Christmas than a show crammed with gleefully over-the-top performances and freshly-spiced and salted humour?