Month: December 2023

Aladdin: Buckle up for a real magic carpet ride for the whole family in pantoland

It’s that time of year again. Deck the halls and all that and check out the local pantomimes. It’s not always easy to find a show that will appeal as much to granny as it will to your eight year old but I am delighted to say that we happen to be particularly fortunate in this neck of wood as we have one the best – a sparkling new production of that perennial favourite Aladdin.

Chris Jarvis (centre) as Wisshee Washee. Picture: Jayne Jackso Ph0tography

 It has just opened for a three-week run at the Lighthouse Centre for the Arts in Poole and really is perfect entertainment for all the family.

Lighthouse has long punched well above its weight in the panto stakes and once again it has enlisted the talents of writer, director and performer Chris Jarvis to work alongside its creative team to deliver a pantomime that really ticks all the right boxes.

 Alim Jadavji as Genie of the Lamp (left) and Andrew Pollard as Professor Pocus .
Picture: Jayne Jackso Ph0tography

Chris knows his stuff. The CBeebies favourite is positively steeped in panto lore. He’s starred in, written and directed festive shows for years and learnt his craft from some of the biggest and best names in the business. It really shows. Chris is a good actor, an excellent writer and a brilliant communicator and above all he understands the psychology of performing for all ages.

This Aladdin, in which he stars as Widow Twankey, is smart, witty and full of festive fun, laughter and music. It offers a clever contemporary take on the time-honoured story without losing any of its traditional appeal and wisely avoids any awkward racial stereotyping and misguided innuendo.

Here’s Hattie Miles’ review

Aladdin at Lighthouse, Poole
Aladdin runs at Lighthouse in Poole until 31st December

From the moment the curtain rises, Aladdin at Lighthouse is a winner. A brilliant cast make this modern take on the traditional story full of vitality, hilarity and slapstick fun. Written and directed by CBeebies favourite Chris Jarvis, who also stars as a wonderfully funny Widow Twankey, the show romps along and engages the audience right from the very beginning. Twankey’s array of costumes are fabulous – they include nods to King Charles, Dame Shirley Bassey and the RNLI.

Genie of the lamp (Alim Jadavji), is obsessed with game shows, and makes the quest to find the lamp, hidden deep in a cave on the Jurassic Coast, real fun and Professor Pocus (Andrew Pollard) makes a magnificent and amusing baddy – the packed audience loved booing him. There’s fine performances too from Aladdin (Benjamin Armstrong), Wishee Washee (Josh Haberfield), Princess Jasmin (Ionica Adriana), the Spirit of the Ring (Stephanie Walker) and the Queen (Jo Michaels Barrington). 

There is so much in this show including great music from live musicians led by musical director Adam Tuffrey. It would have been worth going to just to see the rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas that had Widow Twankey, Princess Jasmine and Wishee Washee racing around the stage and interacting with an uproarious audience. There were also marvelous special effects. A proper flying carpet of course, and a clever virtual flight from the Lighthouse stage to the hidden cave on the Dorset coast. The audience joined in and had the most wonderful time right through this excellent pantomime.  Highly recommended. – Hattie Miles

Aladdin runs at Lighthouse until New Year’s Eve (Sunday 31st December)

Invading a medieval castle in hot pursuit of a secret Macca and Wings recording session

The announcement yesterday of the sad death of Moody Blues and Wings guitarist Denny Laine at the age of 79 stirred memories for me of an encounter with him 45 years ago.

I was a young newspaper reporter and having heard rumours that Paul McCartney and Wings were recording a new album at Lympne Castle on the Kent coast, I decided to go and have a look for myself.

Denny Laine on stage in 1976

It wasn’t hard to find out if the band really were in situ at the spectacular 1,000-year-old castle. Lympne is a small village and I just went to the local pub and asked. The barman nodded in the direction of the bar billiards table. An earnest game was in progress and the players not only looked unmistakably like roadies but they were all wearing Wings T-shirts. Before I’d even had a chance to strike up a conversation one of them was called to the phone. He returned, saying: “They want us at the Castle,” and with that, they all trooped out and walked the short distance to the stately pile nearby. I followed and just as we reached the entrance a car pulled up and Denny Laine got out.

I grabbed my opportunity. ‘Denny mate, good to see you, I said. ‘How’s the album going?’ Denny, who I’d never met in my life before, looked momentarily confused but then smiled and said things were just fine. I simply kept chatting and walked with him straight through the impressive castle doors and into the Great Hall where Wings had set up their recording equipment.

Moments later I was standing right beside Paul and Linda who were talking to a recording engineer. So now what? I took a chance and told the former Beatle I was a music writer (Well I did have a weekly entertainment page) and asked if he would be prepared to talk about his latest project.

Lympne Castle as it once was

He studiously ignored the question but, gesturing towards me, had a few words with the engineer and then wandered off. I was worried now. I thought I might be frogmarched out of the building.

Instead, the engineer simply said: ‘Right, you can’t stay but before you go you can help us move some of the gear around. So it was that I found myself, manoeuvering Linda McCartney’s piano across the Great Hall of this spectacular medieval pile before being firmly but politely told: ‘You can go now’. Which when you think about it is almost a Denny Laine lyric.

I wish I had played a small part in a truly iconic Macca recording but those recording sessions which eventually emerged on the 1979 album Back to the Egg were neither his nor Wings finest hour.

It was by general consensus a fairly unfathomable and uncohesive piece of work featuring a haphazard mishmash of seemingly unrelated songs. It was also the last album Wings recorded before the band broke up.

Back to the Egg album cover

Paul McCartney later revealed that he chose to record at Lympne Castle because he knew the owners, Harry and Deidre Margary, liked the atmosphere and it was quite close to his home in East Sussex. He has since admitted that some of the Back to the Egg songs were a little oddball and didn’t make a great deal of sense and he also suspects that he was smoking “a little too much wacky baccy at the time.”

It may be a pretty poor album but to me Back to the Egg is simply a reminder of a decidedly unusual evening a long tine ago when the ever-genial Denny Laine unwittingly helped me to get into a Wings recording session in a fortress. He was definitely one of the good guys. RIP