Cinderella... My first Panto experience as an SM

22 December 2005 - 1 January 2006
The classic kid's panto based on the story of the kitchen maid, her fairy godmother, two ugly sisters, a glass slipper, and a handsome prince. With contemporary rock songs, jokes and a bewildering array of men dressed as women and women dressed as men. A not-to-be-missed barrage of fun for the entire family. Crude, rude and delicious. Watch out for the forthcoming announcement on who will be playing the ugly sisters. ...

My first ever experience of stage managing a panto. Boy! Or Girl! Is it crazy! Crazy because the Ugly Sisters were actually men (Indi Nadarajah & Reza Zainal Abidin) who had to strut in 5 dress changes of female Elvis costumes all with wigs and 3 inch heels. Poor Reza even had a fractured toe.

The part of doing this was that people (families, children of all races and creed) were laughing from start till end and the good old Elvis fans sand along to the King’s hits.

Everything is not all that it’s seems to be... Cinderella is the beautiful Elaine Dally who falls in love with a very blur Prince Charming; Mirzan. Zaibo her father just returns from the jail; her mother; Joann Kam. You really wonder how the two managed to get 2 cross dressing, men and a lovely daughter.

There’s Buttons; sweet old dependable Douglas Lim who kicks start the whole show by getting the audience to cheer and boo... At one point he is throwing sweets to the audience and argh!! Rats! (Rubber rats that people get to keep.)

There is a scene whereby while going to the palace; one of the ugly sisters look up and a bird (or something that looks not quite like a bird) flies past and Sfx “Splat!” One day we all forgot to reset the bird so it had to fly back-wards. My! We don’t know if the audience realized it but did we have a great laugh.

The glass slipper was not a glass slipper; the pumpkin was a thorny durian; the carriage was an antique Red Buick which we had to push from back stage with lots of light effects and smoke.

The Fairy God Mother? None other than Sham Sunder; who kept appearing in different manner. Once in his towel and loofah; even on a children’s scooter with emergency siren light on it. Paul Loosely the Director, was actually even thinking of flying him down from the catwalk but it didn’t seem like the safest thing to do.

The whole cast of actors; chorus and crew were absolutely great except when they are not on time for rehearsals; or commit to something else on the day that their parts are scheduled. I had to painstakingly look into each and everyone’s availability and plan the scenes to be rehearsed accordingly and they do this! (We had to sack one girl from the chorus for being at the right place at the wrong time; but the rest never improved!)

Pat Chan our choreographer had her share of problems of trying to work with her chorus; rehearsing scenes with Paul; dealing with ‘primadonna’ new comers who fussed a lot and the fun part was she finally got Douglas to move.

As with all my SM assignments nothing goes without a glitch and my usual one is that my ASM are never able to commit to the all the days of the production. Therefore, lots so frantic calls here and there and trying to get friend’s, friend’s, friend to help. But eventually all works out fine and my wonderful stage hands prove to be a great team!