August 8, 2007
A slick, professional "Scooby-Doo!" at the New Theatre delivers absolutely everything you would expect to get from a musical stage adaptation of a children's cartoon. It's action-packed, highly coloured, well-choreographed fun, with excellent impersonations of the beloved characters and a plot that deviates not one bit from the tried and tested formula of the tv shows, except of course for being four times as long.
All the leads - Jamie Wilson as Freddie, Kate Chamuris as Daphne, Liz Pearce as Velma, Matthew Quinn as Shaggy, and of course Pierre Marc Diennet and Fransisco Trujillo as Scooby Doo (one does the body and one the voice) - were splendid. They looked wonderful, with their shiny brightly coloured hair and trademark costumes, and they were careful also to sound as like their familiar cartoon counterparts as possible. They were superbly supported by Francisco Trujillo, Sarah Chamberlain, Meg Cavanagh, Steven Reina and Cooper D'Ambrose. All were accomplished dancers and performed the slap-stick routines flawlessly.
The production is aimed at very young children - I wouldn't take a child older than seven to see it - and made full use of traditional pantomime audience interaction to expand its young audience's conciousness that stage shows can deliver something more than tv - they duly roared and screamed at the various ghosts, ghouls, zombies and pirates that populated the abandoned movie sets of Clawhammer Productions in this Hollywood-based mystery.
In short, the show was very well produced, and the audience enjoyed it very much. It was, however, accompanied by a hard-sell opportunity to offload lots of Scooby merchandise, starting with the programme, which costs a startling £6 (because it is full of games and puzzles). If an adult buys a ticket, they can take a child for free, which would be good value if they were not then pestered into buying glow-in-the-dark Scooby-Doos on a stick. This, as all we parents know, will be filed in the round, green filing cabinet two days later.
All the leads - Jamie Wilson as Freddie, Kate Chamuris as Daphne, Liz Pearce as Velma, Matthew Quinn as Shaggy, and of course Pierre Marc Diennet and Fransisco Trujillo as Scooby Doo (one does the body and one the voice) - were splendid. They looked wonderful, with their shiny brightly coloured hair and trademark costumes, and they were careful also to sound as like their familiar cartoon counterparts as possible. They were superbly supported by Francisco Trujillo, Sarah Chamberlain, Meg Cavanagh, Steven Reina and Cooper D'Ambrose. All were accomplished dancers and performed the slap-stick routines flawlessly.
The production is aimed at very young children - I wouldn't take a child older than seven to see it - and made full use of traditional pantomime audience interaction to expand its young audience's conciousness that stage shows can deliver something more than tv - they duly roared and screamed at the various ghosts, ghouls, zombies and pirates that populated the abandoned movie sets of Clawhammer Productions in this Hollywood-based mystery.
In short, the show was very well produced, and the audience enjoyed it very much. It was, however, accompanied by a hard-sell opportunity to offload lots of Scooby merchandise, starting with the programme, which costs a startling £6 (because it is full of games and puzzles). If an adult buys a ticket, they can take a child for free, which would be good value if they were not then pestered into buying glow-in-the-dark Scooby-Doos on a stick. This, as all we parents know, will be filed in the round, green filing cabinet two days later.