Earlier this month, the News Shopper asked its younger readers if they wanted to be a theatre reviewer for a night and many did. This week the winners of our competition tell us what they thought about the seven biggest pantos in the area this year and there's no holds barred!

Amy Pengelly writes about Jack & The Beanstalk at Greenwich Theatre

Jack and the Beanstalk, like most pantomimes, is set in a kind of olden-days world where ladies wore crinoline and men wore boots.

John Barr's Jack, at Greenwich this year, also had on old-fashioned shirt and trousers, a bit like a pirate. What made the audience laugh though was that Jack came in riding a scooter!

Seeing modern things in a fairytale makes panto funny. Pantos should also be magical and everything should be over the top. There's no point the actors wearing everyday sort of clothes and in this show the costumes were really loud and colourful.

The opening scene of the children singing and dancing got everybody into the mood straightaway. Jill (Vivienne McMaster) joined in with the chorus and sounded a bit American when she sang, although she had a good voice and was very talented.

Barr also had a great singing voice and is very experienced in musicals.

The best bits of this show were definitely the comedy. Rebecca Sarker, from Coronation Street, got us all laughing by doing the voices of the Corrie characters. She also made a great fairy! Ian Reddington, from EastEnders, was a great demon as Stinkwort and got booed a lot. Robert Gray was a very good actor as Jill's dad, the Baron. Ian Adams played Dame Foxy Trot and was brilliant in a massive orange wig which looked like a pumpkin.

The script was written by Roy Hudd and there were some very clever songs, especially the Alphabet song in which the cast sang about every letter from A to Z. When it got to Z everyone thought they couldn't think of a word and laughed when they stopped. After this they did a brilliant tap dance.

There was lots of clowning about, for example, when Jack climbed the beanstalk looking for Jill he got an ice-cream in his face. The Dame Foxy got two!

The big spider was very good fun and scared everybody as they shouted out "Behind you!". There was more audience participation when a little one-year-old girl was brought up on stage by her big sister to sing a song. The song went "goo-goo-goo" and everybody clapped as she danced.

The star of the show was Daisy the Cow, who was very funny. The others dressed her up in fancy clothes and called her Mooodonna. The audience kept on screaming for Daisy to come back on. It was great fun for all the family.

Jack & The Beanstalk, until January 13, 020 8858 7755.

December 20, 2001 12:32