Richard Chapman, Joe Clines, Alfie Scott, Ellie Dickens, Ella OKeeffe in CFYT’s The Wizard of Oz. Photo: Helen Murray

It has long been my contention that Chichester Festival Youth Theatre is one of the best youth theatres in the country and this glitteringly good show simply confirms my view. An eighty-year-old classic, directed by Lucy Betts, it surpasses even CFYT’s usual high standards.

A word, first, about how it all works: CFYT works with 800 young people across three counties. At Christmas the main house is turned over to the youth theatre who present the venue’s Christmas show for a two-week run – a wonderfully enlightened approach. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, second best about this and CFT affords the show exactly the same top notch production values that would be used for any other show. Result? The best stage version of The Wizard of Oz I have ever seen.

This version uses the music and lyrics of the MGM motion picture score by Harold Arlen and EY Hamburg so we’re only ten minutes in before Ella O’Keefe (she alternates at other performances with Polly Maltby) is raising the roof with Somewhere Over the Rainbow and after a few bars we’re hooked and have forgotten all about Judy Garland.

The advantage of a huge youth cast is that you can make the chorus numbers numerically spectacular and there are some very impressive group scenes in this show. The Jitterbug (I’d forgotten what a long sequence it is and what energy it needs) in particular is a colourful, foot-tapping showstopper and the Winkies’ menacing march is terrific too – a rhythmic ear worm.

The three farmhands (Joe Clines, Alfie Scott and Richard Chapman on press night) who become Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion work pack plenty of personality. They sing well and work together expertly. Three tuneful, truthful performances.

There are no weak links in this cast. Every single participant is full on in a quasi-professonal way. Perhaps, in a mainstream production, the casting director would have cast people who look a bit older in some roles but it doesn’t matter in the least.

Simon Higlett’s set and James Whiteside’s lighting design uses a huge arched rainbow behind and over the thrust – somewhere over the rainbow in every sense. It changes colour to connote, for example the arrival in Oz or the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle. Sometimes it is reflected against the shiny surface of the playing area to create the illusion of a full circle and it looks wonderful. Also, utterly delightful, are Ryan Dawson Laight’s magnificent costumes, made by a team of eleven costume makers rather than hired in. No one who sees this show will forget the poppies.

Then, hidden from view, there’s an excellent seven piece band, led by Colin Billing who also wrote the orchestrations for this show. The sound is arresting.

It’s always a challenge to re-create something which almost every man, woman and child knows intimately from what is probably the most watched film of all time. In this case I love the nod to the film by which at the point of the storm which blows Dorothy away to Oz, the costumes, assisted by lighting, change from greys and pale blues to bright primary colours. Even Toto (supremely well puppeted by Ellie Dickens on press night) turns from a grey dog into a colourful brown and gold one.

If you want an escapist show to take you right out of yourself then get to Chichester for this. It’s the best seasonal production I’ve seen this year.

CFYT’s The Wizard of Oz. Photo: Helen Murray

⭐⭐⭐

This 100-minute five-hander, set in the round, is about love, forgiveness, despair and making the best of where you are.

Sonny (Reece Pantry) has thrown himself under a train having had a rather strange relationship with a brittle, troubled woman who works in a launderette (Clare-Louise English). His mother (Shenagh Govan) and sister (Evlyne Oyedukun) are struggling to come to terms with his death as is the devastated train driver (Stanley J Browne) who has arrived in their lives. The structure is complicated by many (arguably too many) time slips and flashbacks which make the storytelling a bit opaque at times. The play ends, for example, at a point which precedes the beginning so you really have to concentrate.

The quality of acting and direction (Amit Sharma) is this play’s strongest attribute. Five fine actors work together beautifully here with as much articulate listening as speaking. Govan, for example, as Nella conveys a real sense of far-sightedness and wisdom which her daughter mistakes for something else. Oyedokun is totally convincing as the worried, sensible but somehow insensitive daughter. There’s lovely work from Browne as Cyrus whether he’s arriving at work and chatting someone he meets on the street, hollow-eyed as he sorts Nella’s garden or totally traumatised in the aftermath of the death he feels responsible for. On the other hand, competent as Pantry and English are it is a very long time before what seems to be a separate story slots into the rest of the piece and even then it doesn’t feel plausible.

I liked the neat way Amelia Jane Hankin’s set includes railway-style illuminated boards over the playing area to connote the station and were then used to display subtitles. Also interesting is the way the cast are almost never off stage. Most of the time they sit quietly in the corners of the playing area when other scenes are playing.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is a show about winter sprites which celebrates the value of story telling and, ultimately, libraries. The three cast members are pretend-earnest spriteologists leading their very young audience on a journey of ‘academic’ discovery because a sprite, you see, is quite different from an elf or pixie.

It’s a warm hearted, linguistically unpatronising (‘psyschological’, ‘reported vanished’) show which includes shadow puppetry and lots of music (by Darren Clark who also MDs). It’s full of good things but the very best of these is Emily Newsome who plays piano, accordion, saxophone, and provides some beautiful dreamy tuneful singing along with lots of witty sound effects. When a sprite hurtles invisibly across the stage she blows sharply into a microphone to create a dramatic ‘whoosh’. She graduated from Guildford School of Acting this year and I hope the people who trained her on the relatively new actor musician degree there are very proud of her because they’re certainly entitled to be.

Alex Kanefsky and Laura Tipper are both fine physical actors, with a wide range of voices, and impressive ability to connect with the audience.

Forty minutes into this show I was just beginning to wonder whether it isn’t just a bit too clever and wordy for under-5s and I was expecting them to get restless any minute because there’d been very little interaction. Then suddenly it blossomed.

For complicated plot reasons there has to be a story which has never been told before so the house lights go up and Tipper goes round the audience borrowing a coat and few other bits and pieces from the children. Kanefsky then asks for the name of an animal – and then another. Within seconds he is improvising a story about, at the performance I saw, a hungry Lion named Jackin, and an evil penguin who is frightened of spiders. Tipper creates appropriate puppetry using audience possessions and Newsome adds music and sound. Bravo all: masterclass in interactive theatre and thinking on your feet. The nursery and reception groups I saw it with were thrilled. And so was I.

The other reason is that they’re a notably talented bunch, wittily directed by Howard Samuels. Now in their final year of theMTA’s two year accelerated course, these students are learning on the job to manage a young, unpredictable audience and to adjust and time the material. I saw the sixth performance of an intensive pre-Christmas run along with eighty-six excited and excitable local primary school children who were clearly having an unforgettable afternoon. And the company on stage were so on top of what they were doing that they were actually better than some of the seasoned pros I’ve seen recently trying to do the same thing.

Jack Toland, for instance, shines brightly as Sarah the Cook. He simpers, cracks jokes straight to audience, trots daintily around the set and commands the stage, putting his own fine spin on the dame concept.

Hazel Leishman is quite something as Queen Rat too. Tall, slender and looking fabulous in glittery mauve with rat make-up she moves and cackles with spiky grace, works her hands nicely and pulls a wide range of very expressive faces as well as singing to the manner born.

Darcy Manning is strong as Dick, packing lots of personality and there’s an enjoyable feline performance by Tiago de Sousa as Tommy the Cat.

It’s Lewis Thomas’s songs and Daniel O’Brien’s script which really makes it, though. The songs are all original – not a stray pop song in sight. It’s all tuneful and appropriate with occasional references such as a snatch of Sailor’s Hornpipe for one number and the repeated use of a few bars from Cats as a leitmotiv for Tommy. I liked the framing device: a group of 21st Century schoolgirls on a trip to Highgate with two teachers. And I’m entranced by the use of internal rhyme (bitten kitten, unpleasant peasant, soggy moggy, nerdy hurdygurdy) as opposed to the usual contrived rhyming couplets. And there are original jokes (no spoilers) in this show which are delivered so that children in the audience hear them and get the chance to respond.

Because performers in this show are students and not yet professionals it is not Sardines’ policy to give a star rating. I would, however, like them to know that had I seen this same show in another context, I would have been happy to put four stars on it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Written in 1999 and set in 1998 this is such a fine play I really can’t think why I haven’t come across it before. In this production – a collaboration between Signal Theatre Company and Park Theatre and directed by Robert Wolstenholme – it is both extremely funny and deeply moving. It’s a long time since I’ve laughed so much in the theatre and yet, at the same time, there’s powerful human interest.

Six people are in and out of a sitting room in Bolton and they are a pretty disparate lot: one, the householder, is a professional prostitute/domninatrix, another is a devoutly catholic, Irish spinster cleaner which an obsessive/compulsive disorder and a third is a teenager with an unspecified personality issue which includes disinhibition. Then there’s a masochistic male dry cleaner who likes wearing dresses, a professional Elvis impersonator and a daughter long since declared dead who had simply left home. Much of the humour, especially in the first act, comes from the situational incongruity of their being together. In fact, of course, each of them is lost and that’s where the focus shifts after the interval. It’s ultimately an upbeat piece though because one way or another they’re all pretty “found” by the end.

Sioned Jones is wonderful as Martha, the cleaner. She talks with her eyes reacting in horror to what she learns about the others, counting obsessively like a mantra in her worry and never smiling. The gradual softening of the character as she finally admits to herself what she really wants is beautifully done.

It’s never easy for an adult to play a teenager but Charlie Bence is convincing with her bold, inappropriate remarks and clumsy body language – until she eventually makes a friend, forgives her sister and finds both grace and gracefulness. Andrew P Stephen is hilarious as the initially pitiful Lionel, a customer of Kellie Batchelor’s character, Josie (played with verve) but Stephens makes sure we see that there’s more too him than that. Matt Lim as a local Vietnamese boy who imitiates Elvis rather badly is good fun – and he really can sing. And Jessica Forrest does well as Louise especially in the powerful scene in which she reveals why she left home in the first place.

The piece sits well in Park90 – Park Theatre’s studio space with seating on three sides. It’s quite an intimate show and the proximity of the audience helps. I arrived there knowing nothing at all about this play and was pleasantly surprised. It’s definitely once to catch if you can.

Photo: Lidia Crisafulli

⭐⭐

Hounslow Arts Centre is underfunded – and that’s a kind way of describing a venue which seems to operate on the most fragile of shoestrings. On first entering the auditorium I was impressed and intrigued to see that it had been reconfigured to create a transverse stage flanked by rows of freestanding chairs. For me that’s a first for a panto and why ever not? And it certainly forced one, quite literally, to consider panto from a different angle but it turned out to be, at least partly, a pragmatic decision. At the end, Jonathan Ashby-Rock (who runs the venue, plus wrote and co-directed this show as well as playing Billy) appealed to the audience for exit bucket donations telling them ruefully that the old, broken seating is hidden behind the Jack in the Beanstalk set and that he’d very much like to replace it.

Not that I would ever slate a show for having low-budget production values. It’s the perfomers and the script which make or mar a production. You can create wonderful theatre with little more than blocks, a couple of painted scenery items, a ladder and a power supply if you’ve got the basics right.

Sadly, on this occasion, too many of those basics are flawed. The script, for example, has very few jokes and the ones that are there fell horribly flat at the performance I saw. Too many of them are badly timed. Even a tortuous, tasteless, predictable routine involving a bum-jabbing protuberance on a stool only made the audience giggle a bit. No wonder so many of the teenagers behind me were on their phones. Panto is supposed to be funny.

Ashby-Rock is a talented man but I have no idea why he adopts a grating, childish whine for Billy. After ten minutes I was wishing desperately that the baddie (multi-skilled Philip Ryder as Fleshcreep who also MDs from keyboard) would simply kill him off and be done with it.

Adam Russell-Owen works hard as Dame Trott. He gives the role a rough edge making her big and brassy with a voice like a rasp on forty cigarettes a day. There’s no campness or archness though and that’s usually what makes the dame funny.

The best performance in this show is Danni Payne as Jill. She plays her as a feisty, forthright female who is much brighter and more competent than any of the men. She sings well too and has colourful stage presence.

I also like the seating of the band within the rafters of a moveable ‘house’ at the end of the traverse playing area which could then be rotated to suggest the giant’s land above the beanstalk – simple and low tech but effective.

It’s always good to see actor musos at work too. Apart from Philip Ryder hopping on and off what is effectively a bandstand to morph into Fleshcreep, most of the cast play guitars really quite well. And Ruby Hamilton who plays Peregrin provides an attractive amplified violin continuo for several numbers.

A lot of people have worked very hard on this show and of course there are things in it to commend. On the whole though it’s dull – and it gives me no pleasure to write that.