Cultural Dessert

On Christmas Eve we made an impromptu journey up the yellow brick road to the Royal Theatre, Northampton, where we bought the last two tickets for Laurie Sansom’s wonderful production of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. It was a magical show – managing both to recreate faithfully many of the iconic moments from the 1939 MGM film and to demonstrate ingenious and original stagecraft. Sara Perks’ colourful design gave each scene a different colour scheme until Dorothy had travelled through an entire rainbow. I particularly liked the stilt-walking apple trees and the use of a trap-door which allowed Kate Russell-Smith’s Wicked Witch of the West to melt before our eyes. Once again Laurie Sansom presented a seamlessly integrated cast with the professional principles supported by 15 local amateur actors and 3 rotating groups of 20 local children as the Munchkins. Natalie Burt (who we had previously seen at the Royal in 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' – reviewed here in September 2008 – and ‘The Glass Cage’ – reviewed here in November 2007) was a brilliant Dorothy. But the undoubted star of the show was the Scottish terrier Parker (or Bradley – not sure which we saw) as Toto. Wonderful.