The Beauty and the Beast of a Panto at the Capitol Horsham

15 October 2015 10:48 AM

Horsham unveiled its Christmas panto, Beauty and the Beast, at a full costume photo-call with the cast (pictured) at the Capitol Theatre on Friday. This week Hello Horsham met up with Nick Mowat who has written and is producing the panto, whilst doubling up as General Manager of the Capitol, to get a glimpse of what goes on in getting it to the stage.

First of course you have to decide which panto it is to be, and that decision has to be made before the previous year`s panto opens, because some of the audience book up for next year as they leave that year`s performance. “We look at what`s been done in the last few years. There`s a sort of finite number of titles. Some venues do a weird and wonderful range of titles, but we tend to stick to the mainstream popular ones”, said Nick.

“The decision this year really came from the people we hire our sets from. I spoke to them and they said we`ve got a really beautiful Beauty and the Beast set. I thought `Oh I`ve never done Beauty and the Beast, that might be quite good fun`. I wanted to follow Cinderella [last year`s panto] with a popular title – there`s the big three, Cinderella, Snow White and Peter Pan. Interestingly there are more and more theatres doing Beauty and the Beast now, and I managed to see a couple and actually it`s a really good story.”

Then of course you have to have a script. “I write the script along with Mike Goble [who played Buttons last year and plays D`Jon M`Stard this year]”, said Nick. “Mike worked with me last year on Cinderella. Because it`s a more formulaic kind of panto, I`ve written the script and given it to Mike and he`s had a go through it. I always jokingly say I write the script and he makes it funnier, but this year it`s been slightly more collaborative.

"We had a meeting back in April and we storyboarded the whole thing. We spent a day together. We had huge great sheets of flipchart paper all over this huge great table, and we really had to play the story to the set [we`d hired in] otherwise it wouldn`t work.

“Of course the whole thing is set in France – originally it was a French story – so some of our characters have a French twist: our dame is Mademoiselle Reneé Tasse de Thé, to which somebody, without giving the game away too much, says ooh that all sounds very posh – nah it`s just a cuppa tea love.”

But you can`t have a panto without actors, how do you set about getting a cast, is it contacts?. “It`s partly about contacts, this year we`ve got three actors returning from last year, partly because they were a big hit with our audience last year, and for the star billing, the Danon character, I knew of Andrew Hayden-Smith though I`d never met him. I specifically put a casting notice out through Spotlight for someone with some television exposure so they could be billed on the poster and got about 30 – 40 submissions and Andrew`s name came up. I though that`s interesting – and that`s how we got him.

“And for other characters again I put another casting out through Spotlight and had a few hundred submissions. Beauty, who`s going to be played by the lovely Karina Hind, there were 427 submissions for that part alone – and that`s a lot of CVs to go through, because you can`t audition 427 people. And that`s down to me [to go through]. And on casting day we had 16 girls come along and we chose Karina.”

And then there`s the juvenile ensemble. Two teams of 14 local 8 – 18 year-olds will cover alternate performances. Over 200 auditioned over the summer.

So what about 2016? “All I can possibly say is that we might be heading to Peking”, said Nick. So that`s Aladdin then. Oh yes it is.

Tags: Capitol, Horsham, Panto