Sleeping Beauty at the Harlow Playhouse

[Ad- gifted experience] We are fans of pantomimes and get along to at least one every single year! This year, we were invited to the Harlow Playhouse to check out their Sleeping Beauty pantomime, which featured the dame that they’ve had for the last 10 years, along with Silly Billy, a fan favorite among the locals. Though we’ve been to the Harlow Playhouse for other performances, we’ve not done a panto there, so were all really excited!

Sleeping Beauty is a classic tale, which makes sense for traditional pantomimes, and had a lot of classic callbacks to pantomimes that we have seen before. They also made a lot of references to the local town and to the fact that they’ve been performing there for the last 10 years, talking about how they couldn’t do this joke as people don’t want to see the same as last year, and talking about how the Dame’s dresses were bigger and fancier than last year too! These dresses were a lot of fun – often I see more of the cartoon, silly drag dresses, but this time, they were all sparkly, stunning, and fun! Kai, who is in his teenager stages, joined in a lot to the booing and shouting back, often laughing at some of the more adult jokes in this show – of which the Dame made plenty, particularly when she showed off a new outfit.

The Harlow Playhouse had great use of the stage, with a particularly fantastic moment in the second scene, which I am not going to spoil here, but it took all of our breaths away. This was Amelia’s absolute favorite bit of the entire performance. There was also lots of singing, dancing, and fantastic characters who really brought the story to life. After Sleeping Beauty is awoken, in a series of events that feels quite true to the tale, the story doesn’t end! Instead, they need to save the captured prince, which was a fun little turn. The prince was so hopeless and so… annoying, that everything felt very fitting.

The giant screen at the start of Sleeping Beauty, which was also used for some fun audience participation, was such a neat idea and great use of technology. When it comes to the stage itself, there were plenty of lights, a disco ball moment, lots of confetti, and lots of layers that went deeper into the stage itself. We also found the throwing out of candy and water-related aspects of the show to be very fun, though we were thankfully sat away from the splash zone! Robin very much found that Silly Billy was, as you might have guessed, very silly. The singing and acting within the show was fantastic, and we had a lovely time.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!