Theatre review: East Van Panto: The Little Mermaid makes a fresh splash with its undersea antics
Kate Bush tunes, dangly kelp designs, fairy-tale take-downs, and even some deeper messages earn the 10th anniversary show cheers
East Van Panto: The Little Mermaid. Photo by Emily Cooper
The Cultch presents Theatre Replacement’s East Van Panto: The Little Mermaid at the York Theatre to January 1
THE EAST VAN PANTO’s subversive and submersive take on The Little Mermaid is so full of raucous fun and low-tech magic that picking a favourite aspect is challenging.
How about the two metalhead electric eels who send volts through their victims by hoisting their devil horns? Or the hermit crab whose only available home in the tight Vancouver rental market is a broken JJ Bean cup? Or the whimsical dangling silks and gold streamers that mimic the undulating underwater kelp and anemone off the West Coast?
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the show hits the sweet spot this year, thanks in part to Sonja Bennett’s goofy but smart script (she also wrote 2021’s Alice in Wonderland). She cleverly takes down the stereotypes in fairy tales (a form, we’re told, that requires dad characters to be an “emotionally stunted widower”, including the one played here by newcomer Andrew Wheeler), and folds in unpatronizing messages about warming oceans and the fact that love is love.
Clockwise from top, Ghazal Azarbad, Dawn Petten, and Amanda Sum. Photo by Emily Cooper
Amanda Sum is dorkily adorable playing Ariel. Instead of the Disney mermaid, she’s a New Brighton beach busker who loves the ocean—and falls for a mer-person named Eeer-k, played by Ghazal Azarbad, who fortunately happens to be “land curious”. The octopus Ursula (Dawn Petten) promises to give Ariel a finned tail—with strings attached. From there, the entire show dives beneath the waves to designer Cindy Mochizuki’s stylized underwater world. Under Meg Roe’s assured direction, it’s a fun trip.
Swathed in a red-tentacled gown, beloved Panto veteran Petten vamps and camps it up as a villain with a dramatic ability to convince people to do things they don’t want. And watch her rap the show’s best line: “I gotta beak and it’s un-ex-pected”. Mark Chavez, as Sebastian the Hermit Crab, is equally hilarious, regularly breaking the fourth wall to, say, obsess over how weird the word “octopus” sounds or ask about why the bubbles are going down in the York Theatre when they go up in the ocean.
The tunes this year are among the best in the history of the Panto, as music director Veda Hille puts brilliant twists on a generation-crossing mix that spans Lizzo and the Go-Go’s. The absolute showstopper, though, is Amanda Sum impossibly nailing Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”—no small feat. Sum manages to capture its warbling highs and whacked-out key shifts, and makes it quirkily her own—Azarbad holding her own when she joins in. Azarbad also puts in a stunning turn taking on Prince’s “Kiss”. Back at the keyboards and drums this year are Hille with Barry Mirochnik as the eels Flotsam and Jetsam. Amanda Testini pumps it all up with some creative choreography—most memorably for a song by Ursula that had dancers in black creating eight wriggling arms behind her.
But maybe the freshest thing about the latest Panto is the love story, and, with it, the addition of a new phrase for fans to add to their “Look behind you!”/“Oh no you won’t” repertoire: depending on how you feel about on-stage kisses, you can scream “woohoo!” or “eeewww”.
Chaos, of course, ensues—and even the bad guy gets in on fighting the purple slime that’s plaguing Burrard Inlet in this show. And ultimately that’s the draw of the East Van Panto—and has been for 10 years: that sense of coming together. By the curtain call, the audience's Commercial Drive-crazy mix of hipsters, little kids, gothy teens, old folks, and others were standing on their feet cheering, thousands of bubbles enveloping them—a trash crab, a starfish, and an octopus madly dancing away onstage. Yup, nothing like East Van at Christmastime.
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