It’s that time of year again, the panto season is upon us! Last night we headed into Manchester to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Manchester Opera House.

The panto loosely followed the traditional story of Snow White, seeing Snow White take refuge with seven dwarfs as she hid from the evil Queen. The Queen hoped one day to be the fairest of them all! Green smoke revealed a huge magic mirror that came down from the celing.

From start to finish we laughed all night long. Oh yes we did! There was something for everyone including plenty of jokes and humour my seven year-old could enjoy but plenty that had the adults in stitches. From jokes about Boris Johnson, Trump, Prince Andrew, seeing a ‘cockatoo’ on canal street and much much more, the jokes were relevant to Manchester and brilliantly up to date.

The entire cast blew me away, the dancing was phenomenal throughout and there was so much energy on stage. It was Craig Revel Horwood’s performance as Queen Lucretia that completed took me by surprise. WOW! From his fabulous wardrobe to his amazing voice! He gave a brilliant performance as the Queen you love to hate and even belted out some fantastic numbers including My Way and One Way or Another. The Strictly references were brilliant too!

Eric Potts was the perfect Dame. His character Dame Nora Crumble had the most outrageous costumes that had all the audience laughing. Eric Potts seemed to be in some of the best scenes including their rendition of 12 Days of Christmas, my son loved this part.

Snow White’s best friend Muddles played by Ben Nickless definitely stole the show for his comedy! Just like last year, his impressions were spot on and hilarious! There was plenty of new material including some funny impressions of James Arthur and Tom Walker. The comedy seems to naturally just flow from him and the audience loves him!

There are some lovely scenes between Snow White (Zoe George) and Prince Harry (Joshua St Clair). One of my favourite scenes was between the Prince and the Queen were Craig ends up with ‘his’ skirt ripped off. Very funny.

The audience instantly fell in love with the very Manc seven dwarfs. I would have loved to see more of them, each only had a few lines throughout the show- usually to shout ‘Ave it’ or ‘ that’s buzzin that’ but they were brilliant. I thought their costumes were genius.

Right throughout the show there are plenty of hilarious moments that weren’t supposed to happen…. or where they? Me and my son are still arguing now whether the things that seemed to go wrong was staged, he’s adamant know of it was staged which I think just shows how good it was.

We absolutely loved it! Its full of music and dancing, lots of laugher, big costumes, plenty of fireworks and even a huge flying dragon (yes a dragon!).

Snow White will be at Manchester Opera House now until Sunday 29th December 2019. You need to catch the fairest panto in the land.

I attended the press night performance and was gifted tickets in exchange for this honest review.

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